A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, and Consciousness: Kant Part Four “Religion within the Boundaries of Discourse and Reason”

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Kant begins his work “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason” by referring to two opposing world visions of human development:

“All allow that the world began with something good: with the Golden Age, with life in Paradise, or an even happier life in communion with heavenly beings. But then they make this happiness disappear like a dream and they spitefully hasten the decline into evil( moral evil, with which the physical always went hand in hand) in an accelerating fall so that now(this “now, is, however, as old as history) we live in the final age: the Last Day and the destruction of the world are knocking on the door and in certain regions of India the Judge and Destroyer of the world Rutra (otherwise known as Shiva or Shiwa) already is worshipped as the God now holding power, after Vishnu, the Sustainer of the World, grown weary of the office he had received from Brahman the Creator, resigned it centuries ago”(“Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason(RBR) P45

The second vision is a more modern Enlightenment vision which maintains that civilization is moving from a worse condition to a better condition at least insofar as moral growth is concerned. Neither view appears to be simply based on experience which it appears could be organized by either of the above visions.

Our experience of life is not easily organized in terms of propositions. That is, it is not clear that what Paul Ricoeur called theodicy(Philosophical theology) can reconcile the truth of three propositions: God is all powerful, God is absolutely good, Evil exists. In his work “Figuring the Sacred” Ricoeur points out that only two of the above propositions can be true and are logically compatible or logically coherent. Ricoeur believes as Kant did not that the solution to the problem is to move away from epistemological and metaphysical considerations and analyze instead via a phenomenological approach the experience of evil in relation to a less dogmatic inquiry into the origin of evil. Kant might also have regarded the above three propositions as problematically combined but in placing his investigation at the level of judgment (and the grounds or conditions of judgments) he does not allow himself to slide into a skeptical experience-based account. Kant’s strategy is to move these judgments into the realm of Practical Reason and the arena of self-knowledge as characterized by his Philosophical Psychology. This strategy results in an inquiry that focuses more on the meaning of these judgments than their problematic truth value.

Similarly, the above two paradoxically opposed world visions outlined by Kant are not to be analyzed theoretically but rather practically, and in terms of a critical acknowledgment of the limitations of our knowledge of a noumenal God. This approach prevents categorical judgments about the power of God’s goodness or the relation of evil to such Being. The displacement of these judgments into the realm of practical reason secularises a perspective which presents an individual striving to actualize the moral law globally(in accordance with the ida of freedom) in a very secular Kingdom of Ends . God is, however, not completely displaced but retains his place in the minds of Enlightenment man as an idea of reason: part of the system of judgments that answer the Enlightenment question “What can I hope for?”.

The achievements of Newtonian science that in the minds of many working in the scientific community brought us a more coherent understanding of the physical universe also in Kant’s view took us to the boundary-gates of understanding noumenal reality insofar as the physical world of physical motions and forces are concerned: took us, that is, to the limits of understanding the law-governed causally structured universe. Indeed, it might be the case that our modern view of science which largely is a result of the technological applications of Newtonian science, originated in Enlightenment expectations. This modern view characterized by Hannah Arendt in terms of a modern attitude expressed in terms of the words “Everything is possible and nothing is impossible”(no recognition of limits or boundaries of any kind) would certainly not have been shared by Kant who would have been skeptical of such a dogmatic attitude given his critical method of exploring the limitations of our reasoning and understanding about physical reality. Kant might have taken us to the limits of our understanding insofar as our theoretical understanding of physical reality is concerned but he also insisted that there was much that needed to be understood about practical reality in order to bring about an ordered state of our individual and communal lives. There was also much that needed to be done to bring about this order, a process which he envisaged might take one hundred thousand years. Involved in this practical understanding and reasoning process was, of course, the necessary exploration of the phenomenon of evil. If we are correct in our assumption that Kant largely accepted a hylomorphic view of the essence and development of human nature and the human condition, then one consequence of such a position is that what he called radical evil is not merely a matter of an innate physical disposition but a matter rather of a choice to do evil as a consequence of a failure of practical reasoning: a failure of our choosing to do what we have the power to do. After noting that experience can be used to support the thesis that man by nature is predisposed to both good and evil, Kant rejects appeals to human nature insofar as it is determined by physical natural laws and adopts instead an approach that appeals to philosophical psychology and moral law:-

“let it be noted that by “the nature of a human being” one only understands here the subjective ground–whatever it may be–of the exercise of the human being’s freedom in general(under objective moral laws) antecedent to every deed that falls within the scope of the senses. But this subjective ground must, in turn, itself always be a deed of freedom…. Hence the ground of evil cannot lie in any object determining the power of choice through inclination, not in any natural impulses, but only in a rule that the power of choice itself produces for the exercise of its freedom i.e. in a maxim. One cannot, however, go on asking what, in a human being might be the subjective ground of the adoption of this maxim rather than its opposite. For if this ground were ultimately no longer itself a maxim, but merely a natural impulse, the entire exercise of freedom could be traced back to a determination through natural causes–and this would contradict freedom. Whenever we, therefore, say, “The human being is by nature good” or “He is by nature evil”, this only means that he holds within himself a first ground(to us inscrutable) for the adoption of good or evil(unlawful) maxims and that he holds this ground qua human universally–in such a way, therefore, that by his maxims he expresses at the same time, the character of his species”(RBR P.46-7)

This inscrutable ground for Kant(cf Aristotle) lies in the agent’s freedom to choose. Insofar as this is innate it is only as a ground antecedent to choice in accordance with maxims. One can neither praise nor blame nature for a choice of maxims that are formed under the auspices of reason and understanding. One can, as Aristotle does, however, define human nature in terms of its powers of discourse and rationality, but this is a hylomorphic explanation and not a pure species description. Indeed the hylomorphic definition is equally descriptive and prescriptive.

Both discourse and rationality will be involved in the process of relating the incentive of the moral law to its maxims. This is the source of all moral praise and blame and also the reason why the disjunctive hypothetical to the effect that “The human being is by nature either morally good or morally evil” is not definitive of mans nature and merely refers to the experiential judgment that both possibilities, insofar as they refer to particular maxims and actions, are instantiated in the empirical world and can be experienced as such under the concepts of good and evil. These concepts, however, apply to maxims and actions and not universally to the nature of an agent who in the empirical world of particulars is capable of doing evil one moment and good the next.

In a section entitled “Concerning the original predisposition to good in human nature” Kant, in hylomorphic spirit refers to three themes which in certain respects resemble the hylomorphic definition of man by Aristotle: i.e. a rational animal capable of discourse.:

1. The predisposition to the animality of the human being, as a living being
2. To the humanity in him, as a living, and at the same time rational being
3. To his personality, as a rational and at the same time responsible being

Happiness, according to Kant, the principle of self-love in disguise, is involved at the first level of the three themes outlined above. It is involved in the self-preservation of the species and with its instinct for communing with other human beings. Associated with this self-love are the vices of savagery, gluttony, lust, and lawlessness. Rationality appears at the second level of our predispositions in which one begins to calculate rationally in terms of a means-ends calculus that is comparative. The vice associated with this is, Kant claims, associated with the fact that the wish for equality is so easily transposed into a desire for superiority, thereby giving rise to inclinations of rivalry and jealousy. The third level of predispositions refers to a moral personality where respect for the moral law is predicated upon a power of choice which is the source for our praise for the cultivation of such a personality. Given the universality and necessity associated with the moral law, this personality is not grounded in the power of our sensibility and its relations to particulars but rather on our intellectual powers of understanding and reason. This form of rationality is neither comparative nor instrumental but absolute and categorical.

In the section entitled “Concerning the propensity to evil in human nature” Kant makes it clear that although there are three different levels of this propensity:

“moral evil is only possible as the determination of free power of choice and this power for its part can be judged good or evil only on the basis of its maxims, must reside in the subjective ground of the possibility of the deviation of the maxims from the moral law.” (RBR P.53)

Moral corruption, for Kant, then, is merely the

“propensity of the power of choice to maxims that subordinate the incentives of the moral law to others(not moral ones)…… it reverses the ethical order as regards the incentives of a free power of choice: and although with this reversal there can still be legally good actions yet the minds attitude is thereby corrupted at its root(so far as the moral disposition is concerned) and hence the human being is designated as evil”(RBR p 54)

Kant does not, however, characterize his position in the terms we encounter in modern Philosophical Psychology and therefore prefers to speak not of action in relation to the will and its maxims but of deeds. Actions are behaviour materially considered whereas deeds have a dimension of meaning that is more formal:

“The propensity to evil is a deed in the first meaning, and at the same time the formal ground of every deed contrary to law according to the second meaning(i.e. of a deed) that resists the law materially and is then called vice, and the first indebtedness remains even though the second may be repeatedly avoided(because of incentives that are not part of the law). The former is an intelligible deed, cognizable through reason alone, apart from any temporal condition: the latter is sensible, empirical, given in time”(RBR p55)

But what then, does it mean when one judges that “the human being is by nature evil”? Well, the judgment cannot be in terms of the materialistic concept of action but must rather be on formal grounds:

“In view of what has been said above, the statement “The human being is evil” cannot mean anything else than that he is conscious of the moral law and yet has incorporated into his maxim the (occasional) deviation from it.”(RBR P55)

The quality of evil in the human being is not then derivable from the concept of the human being and is therefore not a necessary judgment:

“but rather that, according to the cognition we have of the human being through experience, he cannot be judged otherwise, in other words, we may presuppose evil as subjectively necessary in every human being, even the best. Now since this propensity must itself be considered morally evil, hence not a natural predisposition but something that a human being can be held accountable for, and consequently must consist in maxims of the power of choice contrary to the law, and yet because of freedom, such maxims must be viewed as accidental…..so we call this ground a natural propensity to evil…. we can even further call it a radical innate evil in human nature(not any the less brought upon us by ourselves) ” RBR p56)

We bring evil upon ourselves and suffer the consequences and to the extent that our lamentations do not recognize our own responsibility they are inauthentically projecting upon the world a fault that lies uncognized within us. The fault line appears to run between a selfish love of oneself and a selfless appreciation of the universal and necessary worth of one’s deeds.

Animal life and human life in a state of nature obeys the call of sensibility and therefore cannot be praised or blamed for the presence or absence of a moral personality. Human life in a Hobbesian state of nature is therefore not yet sufficiently conscious of its moral personality to be a subject of moral evaluation. Rousseau’s ideal picture of the noble savage living freely and independent of the vices of civilization does not in Kant’s view sufficiently acknowledge the vices of a state of nature mentioned above, namely savagery, gluttony, lust and lawlessness. Rousseau also in his process of comparison devalues the virtues of civilization and culture: he devalues, in other words, the worth of a moral personality. There is, for Kant, no freedom in a state of nature if that is defined in terms of the ground of a moral personality which in turn brings with it the discourse of praise and blame in accordance with the idea of responsibility. Perhaps as man emerges from the state of nature as one can interpret to be the case when Adam and Eve were symbolically on the verge of being banished from the Garden of Eden, one’s cognitive response to such a state of affairs is limited to a feeling of shame at ones failure to obey some external law laid down by some external being. This would appear to be a consciousness of an instrumental kind that is only partially aware of one’s own desires and self-love. Shame is rooted in the sensibilities of our body, and in the Bible, this takes the form of an awareness of being naked to the possible gaze of another rather than being ashamed at the failure to obey God’s external law(a more intellectual form of awareness).

The Garden of Eden allegory can be interpreted in accordance with the vision of a world progressing toward a future better Kingdom of Ends that is physically instantiated in the physical world– a secular world inhabited by free individuals freely exercising their responsibility and leading happy lives because deeds of moral worth constitute not just flourishing lives but just and ordered societies. Kant’s Kingdom of Ends contains Socratic elements of areté and justice, and Kant would see in the deed of the eating of the apple from the tree of knowledge the declaration of a conscious human being that he/she is free to use knowledge to determine the future of their life and perhaps also the future of the species–an epistemological turn of metaphysical significance. For the Biblical view of the man possessing the flaw of “original sin” there can be no possible positive significance in this act of man disobeying his God. In such a view the resulting judgment of the described state of affairs could only be a “Fall”. The telos of such a fall could, then, only result in the judgment of a God who will weigh one’s sins on the scales of Biblical Goodness on Judgment Day. For Kant, this allegory probably captures what he called the “glory of the world”. There is no “Guilt” in this allegory because no moral personality has yet been formed for man to sufficiently judge the words of his own deeds in terms of the standards of Good arrived at by understanding and reason.

The issue of the origin of evil is discussed in terms of the theoretical idea of the relation of an origin or cause to its effect. Such a discussion requires the postulation of particular events in relation to other particular events that have dubious noumenal status. Reason insofar as it seeks for the unconditioned and a totality of conditions requires a discussion in terms of the being of the items under consideration, beings subjected to a law of causality. It is in such discussions that one attempts to end the possible infinite sequence of events generated by a law that states: “Every event must have a cause”. Kant also postulates a cause that causes itself in the sphere of practical reason under the law of freedom, and further postulates a (human)being that causes itself to constitute its deeds by constructing maxims that are universal and necessary. Acts may be theoretically construed as events, but deeds defy this kind of theoretical determination and therefore fall under the practical law of freedom rather than the theoretical law of causality. Kant claims the following:

“If an affect is referred to a cause which is, however, bound to it according to the laws of freedom, as is the case with moral evil, then the determination of the power of choice to the production of this effect is thought as bound to its determining ground not in time but merely in the representation of reason: it cannot be derived from some preceding state or other, as must always occur, on the other hand, whenever the evil action is referred to its natural cause as event in the world. To look for the temporal origin of free actions as free(as though they were natural effects) is therefore a contradiction: and hence also a contradiction to look for the temporal origin of the moral constitution of the human being, so far as this constitution is considered as contingent, for constitution here means the ground of the exercise of freedom which(just like the determining ground of the free power of choice in general) must be sought in the representations of reason alone.” (RBR P.61-2)

Kant also points out in a footnote the temptation to use cause-effect reasoning in order to characterise deeds as events(instead of as a representation of reason) and therefore launch the inquirer into a search for a beginning in time(an intuition of sensibility). In terms of the individual, this results in a discussion of what Kant calls “Physiological Psychology”, a discussion that assumes a causal principle in relation to evil being innate or inherited, whether it can be a kind of inherited disease(medicine), inherited guilt(law) or inherited sin(theology). Psychology at this point in time was not yet taught as an independent subject at University but one can perhaps see an attempted synthesis of a number of the various themes above in the work of Freud the doctor, philosopher, and psychoanalyst. The presence of inherited “disease” accords with the medical model: “guilt” accords with the psychoanalytical model that postulates trauma that can also be transmitted down the generational chain. Wittgenstein pointed out in relation to Freud who had claimed that his work was Kantian that Freud’s theoretical explanations sometimes are purely archeological–pointing backward in time to events that happened long ago. At the same time in the practical task of therapy, Freud assumes the consciousness of the power of our free choice over our actions and the caused traumas of the past: he assumes that is the power of reason to free us from our past. Psychoanalytical therapy in this respect aims not at a “cure” in the medical sense but rather a more philosophically oriented “talking cure”: a discourse that brings to consciousness anxiety-laden or wish laden latencies. Freud would argue that his theories have primarily therapeutic intentions and therefore contain both archeological and teleological elements: archeological events and teleological deeds–things that happen to us(in our childhood, for example) and things we do (in the name of practical reasoning). There is no trace of inherited sin in either of the Freudian accounts because the history of conscious understanding and reasoning insofar as our species is concerned is shrouded perhaps irrevocably in the mists of the past. Whatever happened might have happened long ago and at the dawn of consciousness. Understanding and reason i.e. might have been accompanied by an awareness of one’s own powers but that awareness as an event might not have left any unambiguously interpretable trace. It is then left to a hylomorphic reasoning process to make theoretical assumptions of a continuum of processes and states from animal-hood to manhood.

Mythology aims via a special use of symbolic language to speculate upon the origins of manhood and evil with its own very special set of sometimes contradictory assumptions, and whilst these speculations are fascinating and have helped to awaken us from a slumbering state of consciousness, they have no doubt benefited from the critical Philosophy of Kant and its sketch for a theory of theoretical and practical reason. Kant’s theories may not answer questions relating to the dawn of self-consciousness and consciousness of the world but they certainly provided the basis for the completion of the task set by the Delphic Oracle to “know ourselves”. Kant clearly articulates his position on the role of free action in relation to evil:

“Every evil action must be so considered, whenever we seek its natural origin as if the human being had fallen into it directly from the state of innocence. For whatever his previous behaviour may have been, whatever the natural causes influencing him, whether they are inside or outside him, his action is yet free and not determined through any of these causes: hence the action can and must always be judged as an original exercise of his power of choice. He should have refrained from it, whatever his temporal circumstances and entanglements: for through no cause in the world can he cease to be a free agent.”(RBR P. 62-3)

From the mythological and divine point of view, Adam and Eve’s choice to eat the apple of knowledge was a momentous decision or choice. Mythology could have interpreted this action as either an event or a deed. Interpreting the action as an event means interpreting it either from the point of view of a God who is the first cause of everything, (all knowing, all powerful and all good) or from the point of man, the being who is but a speck of an event in an infinite chain of events in a sublimely massive universe. The Bible chose a materialistic interpretation and described Adam’s action as an “evil”, “sinful” action that would contaminate the actions of the species of man until God decided to sit in judgment of all mankind at a particular point in time. A more philosophical interpretation might, in the spirit of Kant, look upon the idea of God ( all powerful, all knowing and all good) as something in the mind of the animal that dares to use his reason, knowledge, and understanding in accordance with another idea of reason, namely freedom. This, in accordance with the Kantian idea of progress produces the consequence of building better and better civilizations until we reach the point of the secular telos of this process: a Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends. We need to remind ourselves in the context of this discussion of Kant’s view of Enlightenment man and his then-current condition of being a lazy coward not daring to use his intellectual capacities. We should also remind ourselves of the judgment that the process of actualization of the above Kingdom could take as long as one hundred thousand years. This is an important aspect of Kant’s thought because it introduces a note of scepticism into an otherwise idealist utopian scenario. Even in such a sceptical account, we should note that all reference to suffering and lamentation has fallen away, in spite of the recognition of the flawed form of man’s existence.

The core of Biblical mythology, it should also be noted, is the idea of an external law given by a divine lawmaker, a law which man fails to fully understand in the attempt to lead a flourishing life It is this state of affairs that leads man instead, to a life of suffering. Freud, that student, and master of human suffering studied primitive man and in his work “Civilization and its Discontents” arrived at a speculative account of the origins of civilization where a band of brothers commits an act of parricide when they murder their tyrannical father. The consequences of the transmission of such a “logic of action”(murdering one’s father) down the generations will, on Freud’s reasoning, apart from other negative consequences, result in the demise of all authority figures and thus cause difficulties for the progress of civilization toward its telos(the Kingdom of Ends). In response to this envisaged outcome, man begins to install external laws prohibiting murder and other evils that stand in the way of the progress of civilization. In this account, God is not yet dead simply because he is not yet, so to say, alive, owing to the fact that the idea of God has not yet been installed in the mind of a man emerging from a state of nature. Once the idea of God is active and combined with the idea of external law we are on the way to creating the idea of the original sinfulness of man. Freud, perusing the world around him in 1929, asks himself whether all the work we put into civilization is worth the effort and suggests a negative answer: an oracular judgment given the fact that his words were written on the eve of the Second World War and in the light of the atrocities that would follow.

Kant retains the idea of God in his system because he sees that Job’s lamentations over the condition of his life are symbolic of the human condition as such. Enlightenment man could well identify with a character who did everything he ought to do but still led a life of fear and trembling because of uncontrollable external events and the uncontrollable consequences of his own deeds. Job, of course, hoped for a flourishing life but experiences the opposite. His faith in God and in himself and hope for a better life is tested but this state of affairs is characterized in terms of faith in an external agency, process, or being. This, in Kant’s system, is testimony to the power of the internal activities of reason in the mind of a being who is a speck of existence upon an earthly speck situated in an infinite universe. For Kant being a speck of existence in an infinite continuum of space and time is a moment in man’s consciousness or understanding of himself and his condition. This is no cause for lamentation for Kant, because freedom, the most important idea of reason, immediately celebrates the achievements of man in his intellectual arena of activity: activity that inevitably will lead to contentment on Kant’s account.

This can lead one to embrace the speculative hypothesis that man is in essence good and only evil if tempted away from that which expresses his essence:

“For how can an evil tree bear good fruit?”(RBR p66)

The germ of good cannot be self-love, which is the source of evil but is rather constituted by what Kant calls the “holiness of maxims” that urge us to do our duty. Man finds himself on this road to the Kingdom of Ends where his condition gradually moves from the worse to the better the further along the road he journeys. Kant evokes the importance of moral education on this journey where the aim is the transformation of the mind of man and an establishment of a good character from latent predispositions. Yet it is both these latent predispositions and the actualization of a moral personality that is the source of the sublime awe and admiration Kant feels about this realm of man’s being.

At the close of his essay “Religion within the boundaries of Mere Reason” Kant surveys all religions and characterizes them in terms of firstly, moral religions that appeal to the work of practical reason and secondly, cults that appeal to the imagination and the “actions” of wishing for the goodness of man and flourishing life. Christianity is, for Kant, an example of a moral religion:

“According to moral religion, however,(and, of all the public religions so far known, the Christian alone is of this type) it is a fundamental principle that, to become a better human being everyone must do as much as it is in his powers to do:and only then, if a human being has not buried his innate talent(Luke 19: 12-16), if he has made use of the original predisposition to the good in order to become a better human being, can he hope that what does not lie in his power will be made good by cooperation from above.”(RBR P.71)

This leaves man in a strange situation: standing at the boundaries of our understanding, knowledge, and reason, standing, i.e. at the limits of our freedom. In such a situation we are left with faith and hope in something that is uncertain. We do not, i.e. have knowledge of what God has done, is doing, or can do, but we do not lament as long as our deeds are worthy of God’s assistance.

Religion appeals to supernatural events and deeds in the form of miracles that perform the function of the revelation of God’s intentions and purposes: this aspect of man’s activity lies outside the boundaries of Reason. Here Kant entertains a therapeutic diagnosis of what he must regard as the excesses of religious speculation:

“Reason, conscious of its impotence to satisfy its moral needs, extends itself to extravagant ideas which might make up for this lack, though it is not suited to this enlarged domain. Reason does not contest the possibility or actuality of the objects of these ideas: it just cannot incorporate them into its maxims of thought and action…. for it is impossible to make these effects theoretically cognizable (that they are effects of grace and not immanent nature) because our use of the concept of cause and effect cannot be extended beyond the objects of experience, and hence beyond nature.”(RBR p72)

The prototype of the ideal holy human being has obviously never existed in reality but it is presented as an idea in the form of the Son of God, a principle of goodness. A human can only appear deficient in relation to this idea (that is an idea of reason rather than imagination) in virtue of the fact that the idea of Jesus, is a result of reasoning being concretely pictured as a journey along a road of progressive goodness(an apriori idea), This is a different form of cognition to the projection of one form of existence upon another as occurs in the case when children project the form of a dragon onto dark thunder clouds flashing with lightning. The adult projection of the idea of an angry God upon this natural phenomenon is merely a more conceptual form of a fantasy embedded in basically sensible and emotional experience.

The Christian Theologian embraces a theory of change that primarily focuses upon a radical change of attitude towards the world, an attitude that involves a completely different way of seeing the world. This change, as Kant sees it, can be portrayed as deeds guided by the a priori idea of goodness or holiness or, alternatively, as events in an infinite chain of causes and effects extending temporally into the future. The moral personality behind the deeds of a person on the road to Damascus is not necessarily filled with holiness but rather with fear and trembling tempered with hope for a good journey. A hope that contains a future that is boundlessly happy. Here too, Kant’s characterization is Aristotelian, and navigates a course between the rocks of skepticism and the sandbanks of dogmatism. Indeed the Aristotelian concept of Eudaimonia(good spirited) is a fine representation of the state of soul , a representation that those who undertake journeys of moral improvement can hope for. The further along the road the good-spirited traveler journeys ,the more his character is shaped by the good deeds he does and the greater his expectations of contentment with his condition can be. We ought to know that we are dust and that it is unto dust we shall return and that our hopes will finally one day be dashed into pieces: hence the fear and trembling at the fate we all must suffer. We can lament over our fate as even Jesus did on the cross when he complained at his father abandoning him. Lamentation appears to be the natural state of consciousness of hylomorphic man. Change or conversion lies on the roads to Damascus or Via Dolorosa. For the materialist, death is a passing away into nothingness and in spite of all his misconceptions and reductions, this necessary truth is incontestable and may even be too much for humankind to bear without feeling abandoned.

The road we travel on is dusty and filled with temptations to betray the principle of Good or holiness: the Kingdom of Evil is to be found not beneath the earth in hell but upon the earth, (a place which will gladly assist in tempting man away from his mission). The traveler lifts his eyes unto the hills and heavens because it is from this source that the cathartic rain comes to purify and enliven the earth, reminding one of Paradise. Nothing appears as miraculous as this process. Miracles, however, lie beyond the gates of Reason and in such a region, if we are to believe the Bible, God can command a father to kill his son as a test of his faith. The Kantian, who believes in the autonomy and primacy of morality will see no good in such a deed and will also question “miracles” such as the virgin birth and an actual resurrection on both grounds of causality and reason.

On experiential grounds, it seems inevitable that the evil principle and the principle of good confront each other in some kind of spiritual opposition. The man on his long journey to Damascus or the Via Dolorosa hopes that the Good will triumph and that all will be well. In the secular ethical sphere, it is the public laws of the land and the virtue of its citizens that symbolize the principle of the Good. This sphere can be embedded in a political community. For Kant, it is this secular ethical sphere that constitutes a kingdom in which external coercion that forces one to follow the laws of the land and the moral law is unnecessary. In this sphere, the individual chooses his good maxims freely and thereby contributes to the creation of this Kingdom. The interesting political consequence of such a state of affairs is that although it begins with an individual on his journey to Damascus or the Via Dolorosa it ends with a Cosmopolitan world in which Politics withers away. A Kingdom of Ends is in no need of change and is thereby a-temporal or “timeless”. This intuitively makes sense if freedom is the North Star of the system because it makes no sense in the Kantian system for man to live in the Kingdom of ends for “instrumental political reasons”. This Kingdom is created from the bottom, from individuals doing the right thing in the right way at the right time(areté):

“The citizen of the political community, therefore, remains, so far as the latter’s lawgiving authority is concerned, totally free: he may wish to enter with his fellow citizens into an ethical union over and above the political one, or rather remain in a natural state of this sort. Only insofar as an ethical community must rest on public laws and have a constitution based on them, must those who freely commit themselves to enter into this state, not (indeed) allow the political power to command them how to order(or not to order) such a constitution internally, but allow limitations, namely the condition that nothing be included in this constitution which contradicts the duty of its members as citizens of the state–even though, if the ethical bond is of a genuine sort, this condition need not cause anxiety.”(RBR p107)

The state of nature prior to the rule of law, Kant argues, is an antagonistic state as is a judicial system in which laws regulate through coercion the evil in oneself and others. There is in Kant a tripartite division of communities into a state of nature, a civilized state ruled coercively by external laws that are in turn suggestive of moral laws and a cultural/ethical state constituted by the moral law. This is a developmental continuum from a human condition constituted by intuitive behaviour, to a civilized state conditioned by external law and individuals using their reason instrumentally to improve the material conditions of their existence, and ending in a cultural form of life constituted by the moral law where individuals live in a world that is either Cosmopolitan or striving toward Cosmopolitanism. Kant points out in this context that men living in a coercive civilization can easily succumb to temptation and become instruments of the Kingdom of Evil and in this state there is:

“a public feuding between the principles of virtue and a state of inner immorality which the natural being ought to endeavour to leave behind as soon as possible”(RBR p108)

Kant also argues that there are higher levels of duty relating to one’s species that impose themselves upon the individual living in a Cultural form of life because the human race has a duty to progress from a civilized state to a cultural state embodying the principles of the highest good. Such a duty is embedded in a secular vision(as distinct from the clerical vision involving the lifestyle of a Son of God) of a higher moral being which resembles but is not identical to the Stoic vision of the wise man, This Stoic figure, however, is in a sense a man of God in Kant’s system and may even feel himself to have obligations to the church as an organization, not as a worshipper perhaps, but as a respecter of its moral universalistic intentions.

Religion for Kant is the universal institution of all faiths and Christianity is represented in this system as one faith among many. Faith is the foundation of the Church and faith can, for Kant, take two forms: rational and revealed faith. Revealed faith appears to require a command system of laws and :

“Whoever therefore gives precedence to the observance of statutory laws, requiring a revelation as necessary to religion, not indeed merely as a means to the moral disposition but as the objective condition for becoming well pleasing to God directly, and whoever places the striving for a good life-conduct behind the historical faith(whereas the latter, as something which can be well-pleasing to God conditionally ought to be directed to the former, which also pleases God absolutely) whoever does this transforms the service of God into mere fetishism.“(RBR p173)

External divine statutes, rules of faith and ritual observances constitute revealed faith and transforms genuine religion into an artificial pursuit that robs a man of his freedom placing him under a slavish yoke of faith. Here praying, if by that we mean a mere declaration of wishes to a being who has no need of information concerning our wishes is a superstitious delusion that provides no service to God.. Praying and church going, on the Kantian account merely contributes superficially to the edification of the worshipper:

“because they hope that that moral edifice will rise up of itself, like the walls of Thebes, to the music of sighs and ardent wishes.”(RBR p189 ftnt)

Presumably Kant’s judgment upon the content of sermons will depend on whether they aim at superstitious revelation or words that will fortify ones moral personality against the temptations of the sensible external world: will depend upon whether the priest aims at edifying an endless curiosity about the mystery of God or whether he is aiming to strengthen the moral personality.

The church-goer brings his experience of the world into his church. His soul might be in a wretched and miserable state and seek a partner in lamentation over his lot. He may be asking “Why?” or “Why me?”. Insofar as he may receive answers to these questions they may be fundamentally grounded in the myths of the Bible. Catharsis, if it occurs, occurs by immolating his desires in the language of the service: a language that is the language of confession and avowal. Answers will not necessarily be rational and in accordance with the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason but rather aim at conceptualizing the experience the worshipper brings to the language of the service. The work will be done by the imagination and understanding of the worshipper, perhaps as a preparation for theological reasoning where the worshipper’s experience has been stabilized by conceptualization and related processes of judgment. In this process, the “Why me?” question uttered in the name of self-concern or self-love falls by the wayside and the “Why?” question requires quite abstract and universal answers relating to one’s freedom and responsibility. The primacy of the moral law emerges as the organizing principle of a discourse that has left the “logic” of the faith in revelation behind. This story about the Son of God and his life here on earth becomes in Paul Ricoeur’s sense of the term “symbolic” referring to a rational vision of the origin and the end of the cosmos and the origin and end of evil. Insofar as the end of evil is concerned, the individual’s task becomes one of moral conversion on the roads to Damascus or the Via Dolorosa. The question as to the task of the species becomes then, perhaps the practically slow process of the construction of a Kingdom of Ends–a very secular end to a process that begins in the early ancient mists of religion and philosophy.