“The last absurdity of the eighteenth century”

Here is a very fine reflection on Kant from John Baillie’s Our Knowledge of God (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939 / 1959). This dovetails nicely with my previous post (“Kant’s Protestant insight”).

Kant’s great rediscovery was that of the Primacy of the Practical Reason, as he called it. It is not in the realm of sense, he believed, that we are all really in touch with absolute objective reality, and certainly not in the realm of the supersensible objects of scientific and metaphysical speculation, but only in the realm of the practical claim that is made upon our wills by the Good. Ultimate reality meets us, not in the form of an object that invites speculation, but in the form of a demand that is made upon our obedience. We are confronted not with an absolute object of theoretical knowledge but with an absolute obligation. We reach the Unconditional only in an unconditional imperative that reaches us. There is here, as it seems to me, most precious and deeply Christian insight. But where Kant erred, and where his eighteenth-century education was too much for him, was in his analysis of this experience into mere respect for a law. The eighteenth century had its obvious limitations — limitations which could not, in fact, be better exemplified than in this proposal to make law at once the primary fact in the universe and the prime object of our respect. Something of this respect for law we can still conjure up as we stroll through the well-ordered palace and gardens of Versailles, or again as we wander at will through the equally well-ordered couplets of Alexander Pope’s poetry; yet between us and both of these experiences stands that Romantic Revival which, in spite of all its regrettable extravagances, has taught us a delight in fera natura of which we shall never again be able entirely to rid ourselves. The reduction of the spiritual life of mankind to the mere respectful acceptance of a formula was, in fact, the last absurdity of the eighteenth century. It is no mere formula with which the sons of men have ever found themselves faced as they approached life’s most solemn issues, but a Reality of an altogether more intimate and personal kind; and respect or Achtung is hardly an adequate name for all the fear and the holy dread, the love and the passionate self-surrender, with which they have responded to its presence. …Kant’s religion remained to the end a mere legalistic moralism plus a syllogism that allowed him to conceive of an eighteenth-century Legislator behind his eighteenth-century law. ‘Thus’, as — to take only one example — he himself most cogently concluded, ‘the purpose of prayer can only be to induce in us a moral disposition….To wish to converse with God is absurd: we cannot talk to one we cannot intuit; and as we cannot intuit God, but can only believe in him, we cannot converse with him.’ [Lectures on Ethics, trans. L. Infield, p. 99.]

Now it seems to me that it is precisely such a sense of converse with the Living God as Kant thus clearly saw to be excluded by his own system that lies at the root of all our spiritual life.

(pp. 157-159)

Kant’s Protestant insight

I’ve had a long-standing interest in Kant, though you wouldn’t know that judging from this blog. That’s because I’ve been trying to move beyond Kant, by way of dogmatics, for the last few years. But no philosopher, except maybe Plato or Simone Weil, impressed me more than Kant as an undergraduate. It was a real breakthrough, for me, to move beyond apologetics and proofs. It was freeing, strange as that may sound, and Kant played no small role in this new freedom. God is not a conclusion from our observations; he is always there, immediate to our moral framing of the universe, and needs no proof. He has a claim on our lives. To know God apart from this moral claim is to know, at best, a hypothesis — the probability of an object, x, at the beginning of empirical reality. This is not God; this is a theory. God is not a theory.

Kant’s philosophy can free our attention toward the God at our most profound expressions of worth — of responsibility. We know God because we know an “ought” that comes, not from within, but from without, even though it is only known within. The ultimate guarantee that there is a God outside of us can, thus, only come by faith, not by tangible proofs. God cannot be “demonstrated,” whether through sense-based proofs or through a succession of bishops. Kant, then, must turn to the subjective arbiter of truth — the will. This is his Protestant insight, namely, our inability to grasp God apart from the assent of faith, which depends upon the will.

Kant failed, however, to go one step further: the will depends upon God. Kant would not allow this, and thus we are left with a Law and a demand but no grace and no redemption. It was inevitable that Kant’s philosophy could not withstand the problem of sin and evil. Hegel did an even worse job of assimilating this problem, and, finally, Existentialism called a spade a spade.