Abstract
This commentary on Rossi’s The Ethical Commonwealth in History will address three points of interpretation related to Kant’s conception of the ethical community/commonwealth (ethischen gemeinen Wesen). First, I will raise a number of concerns related to Rossi’s use of Kant’s concept of the highest good. Second, I will examine the relevance of the overall project of Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason to his discussion of the ethical community, a matter that Rossi does not take up. Third, I will challenge the optimism that Rossi assigns to Perpetual Peace in light of its closing “antinomy between politics and morals.”
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Notes
Citations to Kant will be to the Akademie Ausgabe by volume and page, except for the Critique of Pure Reason where citations will use the standard A/B edition pagination. English quotations will be, unless otherwise indicated, from the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, general editors Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge, 1992).
Note that Rossi’s language shifts about mid-point through ECH. He initially uses “the highest good in the world.” But then, from page 33 onwards, he tends to use instead “the highest good possible in the world.”
See John Rawls, 2000, 316–7.
Such a view is often seen as flowing out of P.F. Strawson’s influence, and prevailed within the Kant community until quite recently. There are, though, continuing adherents to this view, such as is seen in James DiCenso, 2012 commentary on the Religion. As we will discuss, Rossi’s treatment of Kant’s religion as a matter of “tropes” raises the question whether in whole or perhaps just with regard to some aspects of Kant’s religion, he too subscribes to this view.
In full, the passage reads: “I believe in one God, as the original source of all good in the world, that being its final end;-I believe in the possibility of conforming to this final end, to the highest good in the world, so far as it is in man’s power;-I believe in a future eternal life, as the condition for an everlasting approximation of the world to the highest good possible therein” (20:298).
Passages from the 1790s where Kant discusses the immortality of the soul include: 8:262, 8:269n, 8:328–30, 7:40, 7:44, 8:418–19, 20:298.
An anonymous reviewer suggested that I add that right, not merely virtue, is part of morality for Kant, and that the internal moral change associated with the highest good is not only facilitated by but is in need of political action. S/he references 8:375-6n and 6:354 on this matter.
For a more detailed discussion of the so-called “Two Experiments” and my reasons for using the singular “experiment,” see Pasternack, 2017b.
An anonymous reviewer suggested that I clarify this point. Kant hopes for a time when the “degrading distinction between laity and clergy ceases” (6:122). He writes that “in the end religion will gradually be freed from all empirical grounds of determination, of all statutes that rest on history and unite human beings provisionally” (6:122). We may thus wonder whether there will be still “some ecclesiastical form” needed, though one that is distinct from the “empirical grounds of determination” that are merely provisional. I am not sure whether we should read this as closer to a wish vs something that Kant believes will actually come to pass. My understanding is that this discussion relates to Kant’s reading of the concept of “the kingdom of God,” exploring how its standard eschatological connotation can be understood within the pure rational system of religion.
Allen Wood (2011) has argued that the ethical community should also accommodate the agnostic. While I am sympathetic with the social point, I’m not convinced that would work for Kant. Wood is of course correct that for Kant we are not compelled on theoretical grounds to affirm God; yet, for Kant, it seems we are compelled on moral grounds. Perhaps Wood is correct that under an ideal vision of humanity, a church agnostic would be a viable limb of the ethical community. Yet Kant nevertheless repeats in so many different ways, “due to a particular weakness of human nature, pure faith can never be relied on as much as it deserves” and thus is not enough “to found a Church on its own” (6:103). If this is so for “pure faith,” it seems all the more true for agnosticism (i.e. the view that one does not even need to affirm the postulates but rather just entertain them as possibilities).
Offering a similar reading of the affirmative religious commitments here, see Chignell (2014: 115–117).
An anonymous reviewer suggests that in the Metaphysics of Morals (e.g. 6:350), Kant “lowers his sights” accepting that a federative union is an “unachievable idea” and that at best we can move towards its greater approximation. Of course, this concern is already expressed, at least in part, in terms of a “negative surrogate” in Perpetual Peace. But the reviewer, as I understand him/her, is proposing that by the time of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant would take the antinomy here as having no solution. This may be so, or it may be that because Kant remained under the censorship edict to not discuss matters of religion in his writings (October 1794–November 1797), he continued to suppress the theology that might have been use to advance a solution.
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Pasternack, L. The Ethical Community in Kant’s Pure Rational System of Religion: Comments on Rossi’s The Ethical Commonwealth in History. Philosophia 49, 1901–1916 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00332-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00332-8