Fifty or so years ago, the German scholar Rudolf Malter took on the arduous project of compiling a comprehensive multilingual bibliography of articles, books and monographs on the life and thought of Immanuel Kant. The task was daunting enough in the early 1960's, when an average of 168 such titles were published annually, but following the publication of P.F. Strawson's classic Bounds of Sense, studies of Kant's philosophy experienced a significant upsurge, more than tripling to 565 per year in the 1980sFootnote 1. By the time of Malter's death in 1994, the bibliography stood at over 9,000 entries, with the rate of publication only increasing. These remarkable numbers testify to the breadth and depth of Kant's philosophical contributions and their continued relevance to contemporary philosophical concerns, but also to the difficulty of presenting an original interpretation.
Despite this difficulty, Edward Kanterian's new book Kant, God and Metaphysics, is precisely that: a novel and unorthodox interpretation of Kant's fundamental philosophical motivations and the way they manifest themselves in the pre-Critical works. The subtitle of the book, ‘The Secret Thorn’, alludes to Heidegger's claim that ‘the question as to whether and how and within which limits the proposition ‘God exists’ is possible… is the secret thorn that drives all thinking in the Critique of Pure Reason’,Footnote 2 a line of interpretation explored to an extent in German language Kant scholarship, but something of an uncharted territory in Anglophone philosophy.
Kanterian explores this central idea in an ambitious, at times provocative, way. He argues that the primary purpose of Kant's metaphysical system in the pre-Critical period was to defend his pre-existing religious commitments. According to the author, Kant's philosophy has a ‘doctrinal religious core, more or less stable since Luther’, a core to which the ‘various ontological, epistemological, and methodological positions’ serve as ‘the auxiliary part of [his] defensive project’ (325). The metaphor of a ‘fortress’ appears in the opening line of the book : ‘it is no secret that transcendental idealism is the key doctrine of Kant's mature philosophy, offering a fortification behind whose walls the concepts of freedom…can be protected against any materialist or determinist attack’, and the metaphor reappears throughout the work, suggesting a tense relation between metaphysics, physics and religion, in which metaphysics is put in the service of protecting religion from physics (xii). On this reading, far from being the ‘all-destroyer’ of religious certainties (Moses Mendelssohn's half-admiring epithet), Kant's metaphysical system was essentially defensive, designed and redesigned in order to protect the religious commitments dear to him.
Kanterian sets the scene for his argument with a sweeping historical survey of developments in physics, metaphysics and theology in the early modern period. The chapter is remarkable for its scope, originality of interpretation, and especially for its scholarship, with four hundred and eighty end of chapter footnotes covering an astonishing range of philosophical and historical literature. In addition to helpful outlines of the thinkers most readily recognised as influences on Kant's early philosophical formation such as Wolff and Leibniz, the author emphasises the importance of scientists, poets and religious thinkers, especially those from the Pietist tradition in which Kant was raised, to understanding the pre-Critical works. This insistence on a broad conception of influences on Kant's early thought is enlightening, and serves to demonstrate one of his guiding interpretative principles, that the grand metaphysical systems of the early modern period were not ‘free-floating projects, pursued for their own sake, but connected to the overarching goals of their practitioners’, goals which were in many cases fundamentally religious and existential.
The philosophical and scientific contexts of Kant's early thought are well understood, but Kanterian shows how eye opening it is to also locate Kant in the tradition of Luther, Zwingli and the Pietist preachers, with their interest in the themes of moral and cognitive weakness, and the related belief in the primacy of faith over reason. In particular, this background sheds new light on how Kant came to the views that would later characterise the Transcendental Dialectic. Kanterian highlights how Luther's own critique of reason (the ‘devil's whore’) involves a characterisation of metaphysical speculation as ‘a study of empty illusion’, incapable of making ‘theoretical sense of the mysteries of salvation and of God’, quite strikingly prefiguring Kant's own criticisms of traditional metaphysics in the Critique of Pure Reason. That there is a significant line of descent from Luther to Kant via the Protestant theologians is a historical point Kanterian is rightly keen to emphasize.
Chapter two consists of a helpful exploration of Kant's scientific and philosophical texts from the 1740's and 1750's. Kanterian argues that the major achievement of Kant's early work was the creation of a grand system incorporating a philosophy and theology of nature, grounded in a physico-theology that incorporates deterministic physics within the realm of divine providence. Attention is drawn to the exuberant religious language employed by Kant in these essays, and to his equally remarkable scientific contributions, including the first Nebular hypothesis of the formation of stars.
The argumentative core of the book is a discussion of the essay The Only Possible Ground of Proof for a Demonstration of the Existence of God, Kant's ‘first fortress’, and ‘the most important, systematic, far-ranging and ambitious of his works so far, indeed of anything he was to write prior to the first Critique’ (190). Kanterian discusses Kant's modal argument for the existence of God, and provides a formalisation in terms of contemporary modal logic, based on Allen Woods’ earlier efforts. This chapter will be rewarding, if rather difficult reading for anyone interested in Kant's modal metaphysics. Chapters five and six trace the emerging doubts Kant had about his modal argument, and the viability of his first fortress for protecting religious conviction at all.
It has been common to understand Kant's fundamental project as a kind of ‘reconciliation’, an attempt to mediate between the deterministic implications of Newton's physics and a religious faith in human freedom. The fortress metaphor seems to suggest a rather different picture of the relation between scientific fidelity and religious conviction. On this reading, the relation is not one of reconciliation between two equal parties, but a desperate defence of religion in the face of an apparently irrepressible enemy, with philosophy acting in the role of defender of the faith. Religious conviction is the privileged, but vulnerable party, and the role of philosophy is not so much to find an overarching system incorporating both science and theology, freedom and mechanism, as to protect religion from the deterministic incursions of materialism, atheism and other such horrors.
In fact Kanterian's aim is more ambitious still. He argues that not only were such religious concerns central to Kant's philosophy, but that they were foundational: the ‘unquestioned premise’ of all his thought. For example, the claim that ‘The Only Possible Ground is written against the background of the assumed truth of scriptural revelation’ (251), very much seems to suggest that Kant – and by extension many of the other early modern thinkers the author interprets through this religious lens – was engaged in something approximating Christian apologetics, providing arguments that merely rationalize pre-philosophical religious commitments rather than engaging in the properly philosophical activity of following our reasoning wherever it may lead. This seems to be supported by Kant's assertion that:
‘If I thought that this objection were justified, the conviction about the infallibility of divine truths is so powerful to me that I would consider everything which contradicts them as fully refuted, and would reject it’.Footnote 3
This is a striking statement – Kant preparing to reject arguments which come into conflict with ‘divine truths’, willing to sacrifice philosophical enquiry for religious certainty. This certainly does not sound like the Kant many of us might think we know, but we must be wary not to dismiss the possibility for the wrong reasons. For as Kanterian notes in the introduction, it can be easy to see Kant as ‘a philosopher who could be our contemporary, standing closer to us than God-obsessed thinkers such as Leibniz, Baumgarten and Crusius’ (xiii), easy for us to read Kant as a largely secular thinker, as the philosopher who refuted demonstrative proofs for the existence of God and shackled religious thought ‘within the bounds of bare reason’. Kanterian insists that this is straightforwardly anachronistic, serving only to ‘sanitize Kant for our own purposes’, and the hermeneutic model he adopts serves as a useful corrective to the tendency to treat Kant as a contemporary, interested in basically the same issues as modern analytic philosophers. Of course, Kant was interested in many of the issues that interest us – he was interested in just about everything – but the author is right to emphasize that Kant was no tabula rasa, and his thought was deeply formed by the religious milieu of the 18th century in which he was born.
Kant, God and Metaphysics presents a strong case for the centrality of religious considerations in Kant's pre-critical system of metaphysics, and makes an important contribution to our understanding of the early development of Kant's philosophy. Kanterian's writing combines broad brush narrative with rigorous attention to the particularities and peculiarities of Kant's arguments. Few, if any studies of the pre-critical work are nearly as detailed and exhaustive, and yet the text always returns to the big picture, to the quasi-artistic ‘motifs’ and existential motivations underlying Kant's thought. This book should appeal to anybody seriously interested in Kant's philosophy, and in philosophical attempts to synthesise religious belief with the new science of the early modern period. The reader may form his own view about the central theses regarding the religiosity of Kant's thought, but either way, Kant, God and Metaphysics makes for an intriguing and rewarding read. There is much to enjoy in this rich, deeply researched and passionately argued study about the central figure in modern philosophy.
