Enlightened Spirituality: Immanuel Kant, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr

I

Introduction to the Authors and the Texts

Immanuel Kant towers above the horizon of Western philosophy. He marks a before and an after that reach to the present time: In one way or another we are all neo- or post-Kantians. Just as Thomas Aquinas proposed a deep structure for spirituality, so too Kant represents a different interpretation of the foundations of the metaphysics of being a Christian. As Aquinas has to be situated in the thirteenth century, where he profited by the new wave of Aristotelian thinking in Europe, so too must Kant be seen as representing a turn to the subject in philosophy and to the critical questioning of the Enlightenment.

Kant was born in 1724 in Koenigsberg in northern Germany into a Lutheran Pietist family that was attached to a local church. As a child, he attended for eight years the Pietist school run by the pastor of the church and learned Latin. He then studied theology at the University of Koenigsberg. But his interests gradually shifted to mathematics, science, and philosophy. He was attracted to the work of Isaac Newton’s (1643–1727) physics. He remained a Christian but distanced himself from formal doctrinal teaching. For years before becoming a university professor, Kant worked as a family tutor.

As a philosopher, Kant stands by himself but in conversation with many. He worked in the tradition of Descartes (1596–1650), who, in the wake of the Reformation, asked the question of the grounds of certain knowledge and found the answer in the knowing subject. Philosophy turned a corner from arguing on the basis of observed causality. Because Kant was deeply influenced by Newton’s synthesis of empirical knowledge of the world, when David Hume (1711–76) affirmed that we can really know nothing more than what sense data reveal to us, Kant took notice. Roger Scruton describes Kant’s project as mediating between a rationalism that thinks it can transcend opinion to reach certitude and Hume’s empiricism that reduces knowledge to the subjectivity of perception.¹

Kant became an archetypal Enlightenment figure, and much will have to be said about that. The many thinkers who made up the movement frequently bear the title "illuminati, the enlightened. This immediately surrounds the title of this volume as somewhat ironic because proud high-mindedness does not typify Christian spirituality. But we may allow it when enlightenment means questioning or critical or simply seeing things in a new light of reason without necessarily being reductionist. Such a stance finds far more resonance today than it did in the churches of the eighteenth century. Kant was addressing questions that everyone asks today. Can we really overcome self- or group-interest to know what is objectively good? Is there any truly objective value and universal norm for human behavior? If spirituality" refers to the way persons and groups live their lives, they have to have some answer to those questions, and, in our culture, spirituality has to address the test of critical reason.

This Introduction focuses on Kant’s text Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals. It turns first to the Enlightenment to situate the author and text and to show the uncanny familiarity and distance of its position. It then introduces the author but passes quickly to an outline of his argument. This first part of this volume then introduces the essays of Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr. These great twentieth-century American thinkers take up the conversation with Kant relative to the bearing of his views on present-day self-understanding and spirituality.

Enlightenment

Two essential factors help to locate the thought of Immanuel Kant: his critical philosophy and his representation of the Enlightenment. In philosophy he exemplifies the turn to the human subject as focus of attention. With Descartes, philosophy shifted from reasoning about the objective world in front of us and perceived by common sense, to a critical examination of the human knower, the subject. Philosophy about the world is channeled through epistemology, or reflection on the process of human knowing. Objective reasoning about the world as it appears before us does not produce agreement. Critical philosophy of the subject by contrast supposes that human beings possess a universal or common or transcendental human subjectivity based on the unity of the species.² By penetrating the stages and rules of perception and reasoning, one can attain a common philosophy of knowledge itself and through it a communicable if not common appreciation of reality. These themes of critical philosophy are perfectly exemplified in this work of Kant on ethics. He finds the universal norm for assessing goodness within the human subject.

One also has to allude to the Enlightenment as a context for Kant’s thinking. In one sense, the Enlightenment refers to a group of thinkers, mainly philosophers, who wrote between the time of the death of Descartes to the end of the eighteenth century. The movement is often dated more narrowly as the one hundred years between the English and French revolutions, 1689 and 1789. Some of the people involved were Locke, Newton, Voltaire, Franklin, Hume, Rousseau, Diderot, Lessing, Jefferson, and Kant. These were the illuminati, who proposed to offer light to people whose eyes were closed, who needed to be awakened from their dogmatic slumber.³

But the Enlightenment was more than a group of philosophers. Over the years they created a cultural climate or milieu that became an ideological construct.⁴ It consists of a mix of rationalism, the conviction that reason alone could broker universal truth, and a recognition of the new body of knowledge that was being assembled in the world of science. The sciences had turned to close empirical observation and measurement and gathered an enormous amount of empirical data. It is hard for people today to appreciate the accomplishment of Newton’s synthesis of the collected empirical information of his day into a unity of principles and mathematical methods. And they worked.

A number of keywords may be used as a shorthand way of characterizing this intellectual culture. The listing provides no more than a notional or abstract framework of impressions. But the text of Kant will come alive as it illustrates this new confidence in critical reason. It reaches the height that Aquinas himself displayed in answering so many questions on the basis of Aristotelian reason in the context of Christian faith.

Science. The rise of the sciences of course helps explain the genesis of the Enlightenment. Brief reflection on the shift of our species’s self-understanding that Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo mediated will help appreciation of what is going on intellectually during this period.

Reason. Many felt that human beings were coming of age; they should use their reason and dare to think.⁵

Criticism. Critical questioning (criticism or critique) lies at the heart of this culture. This defines what intelligence or reason can and should do because of what they essentially are. The way to learn consists of reflecting, calling into question, doubting, and reformulating. The process suggests negativity, but the activity reflects inquiry, seeing more broadly and considering more deeply. Criticism translates the virtue of wonder into seeking further rather than taking for granted.⁶

The Greeks. Enlightenment thinkers loved and appealed to the classic rationalism of the Greeks. Socrates was a cultural hero who represented criticism, self-knowledge, self-mastery and balance in ethics.

Authority. The antithesis of reason and criticism consisted of authority, tradition, and ultimately authoritarianism. These obstacles to discovery were lodged mainly in the churches and their allies in government. The Enlightenment stood for an attack on religion and especially on the church; it was anticlerical because every new discovery seemed to be contested by religious traditions.

Disenchantment. The critique of religion went deeper; religion began to mean superstition as the world ceased to be a place of God’s disclosure. The disenchanted universe of the Enlightenment is a natural universe.⁷

Freedom. On every front freedom was the slogan of the Enlightenment: political, social, religious, individual, economic. It did not of course just fall into place, but the ideal was proposed and attracted commitment.

Autonomy. Law and order imposed from the outside is dehumanizing and oppressive: heteronomous. Order in the various spheres of life comes from below, through human reason and freedom itself. Kant’s Metaphysic of Morals is this sentiment’s perfect Enlightenment argument.

Peter Gay used these broad strokes to draw out in detail the inner logic running through three generations of thinkers. One should note that these themes are not intrinsically hostile to spirituality or even to religion, unless one reduces the latter to their objective institutional frameworks. This can be shown by recognizing the degree to which many of these convictions allowed spirituality to thrive in the United States, which was built on Enlightenment foundations.

Kant’s Metaphysic of Morals

In his metaphysics of knowing, Kant tried to reconcile rationalism and the empiricism of the scientist or the ultimate skeptic regarding speculative thought. Through critical reflection he showed a middle way between conceptualism and raw perception. Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.⁸ Analogously, in order to find a universal norm for moral behavior, he argues from moral experience itself to its a priori or universal structure. He appeals to moral sensibility itself rather than try to prove that it exists. Although the work seems laborious, it appeals to experience, and one can readily follow its steps. The following propositions paraphrase the development of the argument.

The purpose of the metaphysics of morals is to ground the idea of duty and moral law in pure reason and thus show its universality. This defines what Kant means by the metaphysical foundations of morality, its being rooted in reason, and the necessary logic of pure reason. Because rationality is a given and is universal, structured by the necessity of logical thought itself, morality finds its foundation there, one that bears an absolute character. Kant’s move seeks to free morality from culture, society, history, emotion, feeling, and authority: All of these things are variable and serve only to muddy moral waters. By contrast, the universal ground for ethics lies in rationality itself, a priori, before all experience, in the very structure of practical human reason.

The basis of morality is a good will; only a good will is a good in itself. This principle is meant to establish the premise that morality emerges not from outside the human subject but from within. Morality refers to a quality of human action. The human subject has within itself the grounds of ethics. The basis of morality lies within the will or is the will itself. What this means can be read in what it negates. Morality does not originate outside the will; it is not imposed by an external law or authority; it does not lie in the end, or the consequence, or the object of an action. The ground of morality is contained within the autonomy of the will itself, a conviction that illustrates pure Enlightenment reasoning.

A good will is one that responds from a sense of duty and law. The term duty suddenly appears in Kant’s text as if everyone is familiar with it. An experience of duty forms the basis of Kant’s ethics. He defines duty in this way: "Duty is the necessity of acting from respect for the law."⁹ The idea is to ensure the internal, a priori character of willing as the determining factor of morality. He consistently contrasts duty to the end as that which makes the good will good, presumably as in teleological ethics.¹⁰ In contrast to this, Kant says that an action has moral worth only when it is done from duty, when an internal sense of duty alone motivates it. He considered acting from duty as an autonomous act, a pure act of the will, as distinct from external motivating factors. For example, a particular goal that one aims at would be an external criterion defining the action as moral; judging morality by consequences also entails an external criterion. Duty reflects an inward respect for an inner law, not an inclination from or toward something outside the human person.

The will contains a categorical imperative to act according to the universal law of reason. Kant then goes on to analyze the categorical imperative entailed in the experience of duty. He frequently calls it the categorical imperative to show that