Abstract
After summarizing the content of Philip Rossi’s book, The Ethical Commonwealth in History: Peace-Making as the Moral Vocation of Humanity, I pose two main questions. First, does politics or religion play a more important role in Kant’s philosophy when it comes to the task of ushering humanity to the realization of its ultimate vocation, the establishment of a lasting peace for human society? I argue that Kant portrays politics as a means to a religious end, whereas Rossi tends to reverse their Kantian order of priority. Second, what concrete details does Kant give in defense of his theory that establishing an ethical community is a universal duty of humankind? As Rossi tends to overlook Kant’s details, I provide an overview. Kant argues that the ethical community can only be established in the form of a church and that the rational content constituting the core of the true church consists of four requirements: universality, integrity, freedom, and unchangeableness. After challenging Rossi’s claim that Kantian hope is necessarily social, I conclude with two minor questions: Is Kant’s theory of human nature dualist or monist? and Must the church create a political form of peace that applies to all human beings?
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Notes
To illustrate this tendency, Rossi (p.2n) cites Walsh, 1967. (All references to Rossi 2019 are imbedded in the text, as here, preceded by “p.” or “pp.” References to Kant’s writings cite the volume and page numbers of the Berlin Academy Edition; quotes from Religion follow the translation in Palmquist, 2016.) Having had my doctoral research supervised by Walsh for a year in the mid-1980s, shortly before his passing, I take issue with Rossi on this minor point. While the dominant twentieth-century view of Kant surely was as the all-destroyer of metaphysics and of whatever depends on it, including theology, Walsh did not follow that trend. Walsh argues not that Kant destroys metaphysics but that he reverses the priority between it and epistemology. Thus, Walsh, 1963 illustrates how one can read Kant as performing such a reversal without taking this to entail theology’s demise.
I first encountered this U-map from an art teacher, Tom Soule, who used it in his Creation and Perception course at Westmont College as an (intentionally?) enigmatic way of prompting students to think about what might be necessary in order for human history to “turn the corner”, as it were, and reverse its downward course. Rossi himself never uses this image, but employing it as an interpretive device helps me appreciate Rossi’s preferred vocabulary, especially his use of terms I normally would not use, such as “trajectory”, “dynamic”, “locus”, and “trope”.
In Palmquist, 2019, 1, I perform a similar imaginary thought-experiment, arguing that this is the best way to understand what Kant calls “the thing in itself”. He famously claims that things in themselves do not exist in space and time, because only appearances are spatio-temporal. If we take this as a purely logical or epistemological claim, it has all sorts of well-known problematic implications. But if we take it as a description of an all-encompassing image, then it seems obviously true: the entire history of the universe is not itself in space or in time, since all times and all spaces exist in it.
Here Rossi may be conceding a point I argued in my review of Rossi 2005 (see Palmquist 2010). To illustrate how Kant points to concreteness in Religion, Rossi refers to various “tropes with ethical and political resonances, such as a moral world, the kingdom of ends, and an ethical commonwealth” (p. 41). Later, he mentions that in the Third Piece of Religion, “the kingdom of God on earth” serves as “[a]nother key discussion with respect to the role of critically disciplined reason in attaining the moral end” (p. 44, note 58); see also p. 57, where Rossi calls the ethical commonwealth itself a trope! However, the mere concepts of these tropes do not constitute the concreteness that Kant calls the “matter” of religion (e.g., 6:105). The kingdom of God, in particular, is not just an illustration for Kant; it is the essential, concrete reality in which a person must participate, in order to benefit from Kant’s detailed guidelines for how to construct an ethical community. For more on why the ethical community—or at least, its religious manifestation as a visible church—is more than just a trope, see §3, below.
In the course of elaborating on this point Rossi refers several times to “the categorical imperative of peace” (p. 52; see also pp. 27, 39n). While Rossi provides two long quotes to flesh out the meaning of this phrase, neither passage (from Perpetual Peace [8:356] and Metaphysics of Morals [8:354]) actually calls peace a “categorical imperative”—though the first does say that making “a pact of nations among themselves” is “a direct duty.” Rossi could have strengthened his argument by explaining more explicitly whether he really means that Kant raises the duty of peace to the level of being a full-fledged formulation of the categorical imperative itself.
I use “ethical commonwealth” when quoting from Rossi’s text or referring directly to his position and “ethical community” when quoting from Kant’s text or referring directly to his position. Both translate Kant’s term, ethische gemeinen Wesen.
Where Kant’s use of Bestimmung is typically translated as “vocation”, I translate it as “predetermination”. The latter fits better with this word’s standard, epistemological use, where Bestimmung is normally translated as “determination”. Using “vocation” is misleading, because Kant’s meaning has nothing to do with a person’s job or employment. For a full explanation of why this new translation is superior to the alternatives, see Palmquist, 2016, 521–522, where I also explain that in such contexts Kant’s use of Bestimmung means that our moral “calling” as human beings is determined in advance. Thus, Kant argues in Religion that we cannot change the fact that as human beings our predisposition is good while our propensity is evil. Saying our moral predisposition and propensity are both predetermined does not, however, mean that the status of our Gesinnung (“conviction”) is predetermined. Kant never says that our Gesinnung (whose nature always depends on our free choice) is part of the human Bestimmung.
For a detailed defense of the claim that Kant views the ethical community as necessarily taking a non-political form (namely, as a church), see Palmquist, 2020. As I also explain in that article, however, this does not prevent the ethical/church community from having a definite influence on the political realm and an impact on the way people engage in the political realm.
By pointing out that politics is external and therefore secondary for Kant, I do not mean to imply that appropriately conducting this external side of human life is unimportant. Quite to the contrary, Kant’s theory of conversion (especially his solution to the third difficulty, in subsection C of Section One of Religion’s Second Piece) emphasizes that human persons are largely ignorant of our internal (noumenal, moral) nature, and therefore our best way of assessing our own moral progress often requires us to assess how our external behavior has improved over time. Politics has a directly parallel (i.e., essential, yet secondary) role to play for Kant, in its relation to religion.
In Palmquist, 2020 I clarify a point that might have been left ambiguous in Palmquist, 2000, and perhaps even in Palmquist, 2019: Kant’s concept of “Critique”, as such, is not explicitly religious; however, it is (implicitly) mystical in a variety of different ways. Indeed, the many mystical connotations of Kantian Critique are precisely the reason morality (and through it, the entirety of Kant’s Critical System) leads inextricably to religion.
In its theoretical application, Critique lays bare the limiting conditions of space, time, and the categories; in its practical application, the limiting conditions are freedom and the categorical imperative. In Religion Kant argues that, taken together, these show human beings to be beset with evil that is “radical”—i.e., with evil that is so deeply rooted in our nature that it can be overcome only through religious conversion. When Rossi refers to “war” as the paradigmatic “social form of radical evil” (see pp. 33, 37, 49, 53, 64), he is using “radical” in a different sense from the one Kant intended; in such uses by Rossi, “radical” appears to mean “extreme” or “horrific”. My thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing out this apparent equivocation in Rossi’s usage.
This is as true of Rossi’s Element as it has been of some of his past work on similar topics. See e.g., Rossi, 2005. Palmquist, 2010 raises this same criticism of Rossi’s focus on the ethical commonwealth, to the almost total exclusion of Kant’s theory of the church (see also Palmquist, 2016, 267n). As he did not respond (explicitly) to my criticism in his Element, I am pleased to offer him here another opportunity by specifying here precisely which details I had in mind.
Kant’s term, Lauterkeit, is usually translated as “purity”. But doing so causes one of the most serious errors English readers have made in interpreting Kant’s theory of religion: reading this “purity” as if it is identical to the purity Kant talks about in the Critique of Pure Reason. But “pure” in the latter context is reinen, which refers not to moral integrity but to an absence of sensible content.
I agree with Rossi that “awareness that ‘I can’ gives hope that ‘I will’” (p. 54) but without providing a guarantee (see Rossi’s note 72). Indeed, in view of our radical evil, this is precisely the problem that gives rise to religion: practical reason alone cannot guarantee that our morally based hope is ultimately rational, so reason must become religious. For Kant, religion genuinely empowers us by providing the occasion for the supersensible to break into human history, thereby making a real change in the moral trajectory of our lives.
Likewise, Rossi concludes the book by calling the ethical commonwealth “the dynamics of human recognition and respect” (p. 57). The “horizon” is the turning point, which takes us, as it were, “around the corner” of this universal development and enables us to begin an upward trajectory along the map of human history introduced in §1. This imperceptible turning point is the “horizon of mutual recognition and respect.”
Along the same lines, Palmquist, 2019 argues that Kantian Critique points the way to a new form of mysticism.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong’s University Grants Committee (UGC) for providing me with a grant from the General Research Fund (GRF) for a project closely related to this article.
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Palmquist, S.R. Humanity’s Moral Trajectory: Rossi on Kantian Critique. Philosophia 49, 1887–1900 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00331-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00331-9