In the B Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant wrote that “I had to deny knowledge to make room for faith” (Ich mußte also das Wissen aufheben, um zum Glauben Platz zu bekommen, B xxx). Kant’s life’s work, his critical philosophy, seems to be ultimately crowded out by religion. Yet Johann Georg Scheffner, one of Kant’s oldest friends, made it clear in his reminiscences that the man himself had no interest in organized religion. As Kant’s biographer Manfred Kuehn summarizes it: “It was clear to anyone who knew Kant personally that he had no faith in a personal God. Having postulated God and immortality, he himself did not believe in either.” This seeming contradiction captures well the tension that lies in answering the question: is Kant a secular philosopher? For on the one hand we have someone hailed as the Enlightenment intellectual par excellence, he who built a cathedral to reason. To this end, we can note Kant’s “humiliation” of faith, his drawing of a sharp boundary to the claims of God, and his establishment of both theoretical and practical philosophy on the only grounds available to autonomous human beings, those of reason. Yet in the same critiques, both the first and the second, we find Kant not only assuming God as a “practical postulate of reason” but in fact securing for God a privileged place beyond all knowledge and understanding. Faith, in other words, is central to Kant from his earliest Pietist upbringing through his precritical period right up until the end of his life. What gives?
In this paper, I examine this question in four parts. In the first part, I consider just what “secular” might mean. I distinguish “secularism” from “belief in God,” and bracket the latter question for the remainder of the paper to focus instead on the ways in which Kant delimited separated domains for knowledge and for faith, a sort of boundary-marking that I consider a basic secular act. In the second part, I consider the biographical background that informs our answer to this question, focusing especially on his Lutheran upbringing on the one hand and his later complicated relations with the authorities on the other hand. This leads us to the consideration in the third part of the place of religion and secularism beginning with what we might call Kant’s more “journalistic” writings — such as the essay “What is Enlightenment?” where Kant’s ruthless criticism of religion is made so vivid and clear. But this is not the end of the story. Finally, in the fourth part, I return to this question in the context of Kant’s first and second critiques, and end by considering once again the statement from the B preface that Kant “had to deny knowledge to make room for faith.”
I.
Of course, the first response to the question “Was Kant a secular philosopher?” ought to be: “What does ‘secular’ even mean?” Thankfully, this is a topic robustly addressed by anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers. To consider just one instance, by a philosopher who is himself an astute reader of Kant, let us turn to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. Taylor distinguishes between three senses of the “secular.” In the first sense, we might think of the process of “secularization” of law, education, or political economy, such that these are now distinguished from and no longer associated with religion. The example par excellence of this sense might be Henry VIII’s “secularization” of the monasteries, i.e. the dispossession of monastic endowments by the early modern English state. This is an exemplary instance of Taylor’s point that “whereas the political organization of all pre-modern societies was in some way connected to, based on, guaranteed by some faith in, or adherence to God, or some notion of ultimate reality, the modern Western state is free from this connection” (1). It is important to note that this kind of “secularization” in no way corresponds to a decline in religious observance. As in the United States today, a longstanding separation of Church and State is fully compatible with equally longstanding and robust observance of religion. But this latter sense of a decline in religiosity is precisely what many people think of when they discuss “secularization”: in this second sense, Taylor says, “secularity consists of the falling off of religious belief and practice, in people turning away from God, and no longer going to Church” (2).
Taylor thinks that both this first and second senses of “secularity” are best addressed through a more basic third sense of the secular which focuses on the “conditions of belief”: that is to say, the very circumstances under which it becomes possible to consider that one might believe or not believe in God. As Taylor puts it:
the change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others. … Belief in God is no longer axiomatic. There are alternatives. (3)
Secularization, then, corresponds neither to an institutional transformation nor a decline in religious belief. Instead, to inquire into the secular is to inquire into the conditions of possibility of belief and unbelief alike. The “secular” is an intellectual-societal transformation that makes unbelief in God a live possibility. This is a transformation in which philosophy plays a key role. To ask whether Kant is a secular philosopher, then, is to enquire into Kant’s place in the history of ideas, in a transformation of modernity that is at once political, intellectual, and social. For this purpose, it behooves us to first place Kant within his own political, intellectual and social environment.
II.
Kant was not born into a secular milieu. For one thing, he was very much an eighteenth-century intellectual: he was born in 1724 and died in 1804, just shy of his eightieth birthday, having lived only a few last (senile) years in the nineteenth century. Kant’s father, Johann Georg Kant, was a harness-maker in Königsberg, in East Prussia. His mother, Anna Regina Reuter, was also born to a family of harness-makers. As is well-known, Kant never left the city of his birth: although he read and corresponded widely, therefore, it is from Königsberg the place that any sense of Kant the man must be gleaned. In particular, much hubbub has been made about the Pietist leanings of his parents. Manfred Kuehn describes the Pietist movement well in his biography of Kant:
Kant’s parents were religious. They were deeply influenced by Pietism, especially his mother, who followed the Pietistic beliefs and practices then current in the circles of tradesmen and the less educated townspeople in Konigsberg. Pietism was a religious movement within the Protestant churches of Germany. It was to a large extent a reaction to the formalism of Protestant orthodoxy. Orthodox theologians and pastors placed great emphasis on the so-called symbolic books, and they required strict verbal adherence to their teaching. … Most of them had made comfortable arrangements with the local gentry, and they were often disdainful of the simpler and less educated people of the city. The Pietists, by contrast, emphasized the importance of independent Bible study, personal devotion, the priesthood of the laity, and a practical faith issuing in acts of charity. Pietism was an evangelical movement, and it usually involved an insistence on a personal experience of radical conversion or rebirth, and an abrogation of worldly success. … Pietism was a “religion of the heart,” very much opposed to intellectualism and characterized by an emotionalism that bordered at times on mysticism. (34–35)
Now, it is certain that this movement formed Kant: his mother took her children to Sunday school with Franz Albert Schulz, a prominent Pietist intellectual. Kant later enrolled in the local Pietist school, the Collegium Fridericianum; as Kuehn relates it, “the story, probably true, is that it was Schulz who first noticed Kant’s great promise and persuaded his parents to send their son to the Collegium in preparation for a later education in theology” (46).
There has been much dispute over the extent of the influence this childhood upbringing had on Kant. Much of the debate hinges on Kant’s relationship with his mother, who died while Kant was just thirteen. His mother was by all means a religious woman, even giving Kant the name “Emanuel,” or “God is with him,” because the Old Prussian Almanac associated this name with Kant’s date of birth, 22 April.[7] Late in his life, Kant is reported to have said: “I will never forget my mother, for she implanted and nurtured in me the first germ of goodness; she opened my heart to the impressions of nature; she awakened and furthered my concepts, and her doctrines have had a continual and beneficial influence in my life.” Some later authors have taken the impulse from chreiai like these to psychoanalyze Kant, going so far as to claim that Kant “repressed” his grief over his mother’s death and therefore did not learn to appreciate the importance of the nonrational side of human nature — and therefore there is a straight line from Kant’s mother’s early death to the philosopher’s later conception of morality as freedom from affects and desire. I think this is a stretch, to say the least. But I think it is much more plausible to admit that Kant’s later thinking about religion in particular remained tied to his childhood and his memories of his mother, who he called “a woman of great and natural understanding … who had a noble heart, and possessed a genuine religiosity that was not in the least enthusiastic.” Such faith, with nobility of character but without enthusiasm (eine Glaube ohne Schwärmerei), is not too far off from Kant’s later understanding of religion.
The claim being made here, then, is not one of psychoanalytic or biographical determinism — that Kant’s Pietist upbringing and relation with his dearly departed mother in some way provide the “key” to figuring out his relationship to religion. Rather, I find it curious that in many of the chreiai spread about the aged Kant, he reminisces fondly about the kind of religion that he associated with his upbringing, like many a rationalist nostalgic for a time of simpler, better human conduct:
Even if the religious views of that time … and the concepts of what was called virtue and piety were anything but clear and sufficient, the people actually were virtuous and pious. One may say as many bad things about Pietism as one will. Enough already. The people who took it seriously were characterized by a certain kind of dignity. They possessed the highest qualities that a human being can possess, namely that calmness and pleasantness, that inner peace that can be disturbed by no passion. No need, no persecution, no dispute could make them angry or cause them to be enemies of anyone. (40)
This reminds me, for example, of Talal Asad, whose Saudi mother gave him a sense of “ordinary religion,” the religious practices that constitute most people’s expression of faith, in counterdistinction to lofty debates about “belief” or “unbelief.” Insofar as we want to inquire into the third of Taylor’s senses of “secularity,” that is the very conditions of possibility of philosophical debates about religious belief, it is helpful to keep in mind this background sense of religion that Kant associated with his mother’s “kind heart” and “dignity,” a sort of ordinary piety and peace that the philosopher always thought highly of even as his research in metaphysics took him into uncharted territory.
II.
Yet although Kant himself remained firmly rooted in his home city of Königsberg, his thought developed in full awareness of the rapidly changing society and politics that unfolded especially in the last thirty years of his life. A well-known example is the French Revolution. The immense social, political, and intellectual ferment between roughly 1776 and 1800 profoundly affected Kant’s thought, as is particularly evident in his “journalistic” writings. Take the famous 1784 essay “What is Enlightenment?” for instance. Written in response to a call by the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift, Kant speaks boldly about what it means to become enlightened: that is, to emerge from one’s self-incurred “minority” or “immaturity” (Unmündigkeit). “It is so convenient to be immature!” Kant says: “If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all. I need not think, so long as I can pay.” Kant here is the ruthless critic of everything existing — “dogmas and formulas,” despots and tyrants, self-appointed “guardians” of all sorts. Against those who say “don’t argue!” — the tax collector, the military officer, and the clergyman, too — Kant advocates for freedom, specifically the “freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters.” The consequences are profound. Kant makes clear, for instance, that not even “an ecclesiastical synod or a venerable presbytery (as the Dutch call it)” could be entitled to subscribe to a set of doctrines that must lie beyond critique, for
a contract of this kind, concluded with a view to preventing all further enlightenment of mankind for ever, is absolutely null and void, even if it is ratified by the supreme power, by Imperial Diets and the most solemn peace treaties. One age cannot enter into an alliance on oath to put the next age in a position where it would be impossible for it to extend and correct its knowledge, particularly on such important matters, or to make any progress whatsoever in enlightenment. This would be a crime against human nature, whose original destiny lies precisely in such progress. (57)
Indeed, Kant even says that it is precisely “matters of religion” that constitute “the focal point of enlightenment, … because religious immaturity is the most pernicious and dishonourable variety of all” (59). To deny a priori that religion might be criticized is a crime against humanity.
These are radical words for a radical time. But it will not do to cordon off Kant’s “journalistic” writings from his “theoretical” work. For one thing, there are moments in even the driest of his writings, the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant the radical bares his teeth. One such passage lies in a famous footnote to the 1781 preface to the first critique:
Our age is the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit. Religion through its holiness and legislation through its majesty commonly seek to exempt themselves from it. But in this way they excite a just suspicion against themselves, and cannot lay claim to that unfeigned respect that reason grants only to that which has been able to withstand its free and public examination. (A xi)
Neither holiness (Heiligkeit) nor majesty (Majestät) can or should be grounds for blunting the sword of criticism. Before the relentless pursuit of reason’s own end everything must submit.
It is easy enough to draw a straight line from Kant’s “genuine age of criticism” to Marx’s “ruthless criticism of everything existing.” Indeed, there are many for whom Kritik is still the watchword, for whom secularity represents the triumph of reason, the only grounds of true human autonomy, over all the prejudices and dogmas of traditional society. What is certain is that Kant through the critical project and its “Copernican Revolution” introduced a “new humanism,” a philosophical move that inspired later thinkers from Feuerbach to Nietzsche to deny the existence of God and instead insist that the world is “human, all too human.” Exemplary of this “negative” philosophy of religion is Kant’s basic declaration that no knowledge of God is possible, because God, like all things in themselves, falls outside the bounds of cognition. The Critique of Pure Reason is concerned most fundamentally with precisely this act of demarcating the boundaries of our knowledge. Along the way, Kant explicitly rejects traditional arguments for God’s existence, including (his version of) Anselm’s “ontological argument.”
IV.
Yet Kant’s philosophy of religion is not entirely negative. Quite the contrary. Kant not only ultimately affirms God’s existence (albeit a God that is beyond both reason and experience), he even states in the B preface that his whole critical philosophy is in a way subsumed by a positive philosophy to come, wherein God, freedom, and the soul are given pride of place: “thus I had to deny knowledge to make room for faith” (B xxx). There are two things I would like to note about this quote, now that we have returned to it. First, the gap of six years between the first and second editions of the first Critique is not insignificant. Kant most certainly continued to stand by his first book. But I would argue that his thinking shifted in light of his writing of the Critique of Practical Reason, which was published in 1788. It is in this work that Kant makes clear that God, like freedom, is a necessary “postulate of practical reason.” It is in this work, too, that Kant famously spoke of “two things [that] fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” (5:161). In other words, in the Critique of Practical Reason Kant gives voice to the sublime, which appears to him in God above and freedom within. It is in light of this realization, I wager, that Kant adds a new preface to the Critique of Pure Reason to underscore that his work had no intention of undermining the grounds for God and freedom, but precisely securing the grounds for them — by undertaking in the first place “to clear and level a ground that was completely overgrown” (A xxi).
I think this is made clear, second, by the context of the passage in which the quote from the B preface comes. He imagines someone asking: “What sort of treasure is it that we intend to leave to posterity, in the form of a metaphysics that has been purified through criticism but thereby also brought into a changeless state?” Is the Critique merely of “negative utility, teaching us never to venture with speculative reason beyond the boundaries of experience”? Indeed, “in fact that is its first usefulness” (B xxiv). But
this critique is also in fact of positive and very important utility, as soon as we have convinced ourselves that there is an absolutely necessary practical use of pure reason (the moral use), in which reason unavoidably extends itself beyond the boundaries of sensibility, without needing any assistance from speculative reason, but in which it must also be made secure against any counteraction from the latter, in order not to fall into contradiction with itself. (B xxv)
The positive utility of reason comes about because of “an absolutely necessary practical use of pure reason”: the moral use. In particular, consider the case of freedom. Kant says:
I cannot cognize freedom as a property of any being to which I ascribe effects in the world of sense, because then I would have to cognize such an existence as determined, and yet not as determined in time (which is impossible, since I cannot support my concept with any intuition), nevertheless, I can think freedom to myself, i.e., the representation of it at least contains no contradiction in itself, so long as our critical distinction prevails between the two ways of representing (sensible and intellectual), along with the limitation of the pure concepts of the understanding arising from it, and hence that of the principles flowing from them. (B xxvii)
In limiting cognition of freedom, Kant is by no means trying to disprove freedom; quite the opposite, he is in fact securing the grounds for thinking freedom. Kant says next: “Just the same sort of exposition of the positive utility of critical principles of pure reason can be given in respect to the concepts of God and of the simple nature of our soul, which, however, I forgo for the sake of brevity” (B xxix). What is stated, in brevity, is quite simple: “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (B xxx). Kant delimits the boundaries of cognition in order to secure room for faith.
Conclusion
Finally, then, I would argue in response to the question posed in this essay that Kant is a secular philosopher in Taylor’s third sense: the fundamental act of his critical philosophy is a sort of demarcation of boundaries, conditions of possibility that are not simply limits on our thinking but are in fact boundaries that separate the domain of reason proper from the realm of religion proper. Kant’s project, I think, is dual: (1) to secure the grounds for science, the pursuit of reason he spent his career elaborating; and (2) to secure the grounds for everyday piety, the “genuine religiosity” that is “not in the least enthusiastic” that Kant associated above all with his mother and the ordinary folk of Königsberg. Despite what biographers like Kuehn might argue, I think Kant is by no means an atheist. To take seriously statements like that in the B preface, that he “had to deny knowledge to make room for faith,” means recognizing the great significance religion had to Kant the thinker and Kant the man, even as we recognize how his work played an extraordinarily significant role in the development of a the “ruthless criticism of everything existing” that would become an ineluctable part of modernity, inaugurating thus a true “secular age.”