Kant and the Divine

Although grasping attempts at secularization are bound to continue, Kant’s philosophy of religion has gained a secure foothold in mainstream Kant scholarship where it is rightly viewed by many as a vital part of his system demanding scholarly attention. Given the mistaken but lingering perception that Kant’s commitment to Enlightenment ideals precludes a robust role for the divine, such scholarly efforts are often preoccupied with providing a defense of Kant’s insistence—recurring throughout his mature philosophical system—that “morality thus inevitably leads to religion” (Insole 262). In new offerings both published in 2020, Christopher J. Insole and Allen W. Wood each provide confident interpretations of this claim that are built upon decades of work and rooted in the shared conviction that the main issue confronting Kant’s reader is not the difficulty of his text but our own ideologically motivated refusal to take him at his word. For both authors, this refusal has far-reaching implications for our own self-understanding and the possibility of individual and communitarian moral progress. As Wood insists in his preface, “A self-inflicted intellectual incapacity to appreciate the human potential of religion is a serious deficiency in the culture of most scientists and most academic humanists” (xix). Whether or not Insole would agree with this specific statement, both authors have built their projects around the claim that Kant’s system reserves a deep-seated and indispensable role for the divine in human moral life that we are worse off for overlooking. Beyond this shared starting point, however, the presuppositions and methods adopted by Wood and Insole pull them in opposite directions and set up two extraordinarily different interpretations of Kant. Reading both books together thereby grants insight into just how much remains unsettled, not only with respect to Kant’s view of religion, but even as regards the broader philosophical influences and commitments that motivate his system as a whole.

Contemplation · Epistemology · Political science · Theology · Law · Medieval Philosophy and Theology · Philosophy · Theology and Philosophy of Evil · War, Ethics, and Justification