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  • The Political Theology of Critical Philosophy:Reading Kant’s Ideas of Religion
  • Daniel Weidner

Kant’s work is epochal for the modern understanding of religion just as it is defining for the contemporary relation between theology and philosophy. At first glance, Kant’s critique of metaphysics, and more precisely his treatment of the concepts of God, infinity, and immortality, appears to neatly separate two areas that had hitherto been intertwined. Indeed, Kant portrays himself as a kind of honest middleman doling out the estate of theological metaphysics, especially in the famous passage from the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason: “I must abolish knowledge in order for there to be space for faith.”1 However, this can hardly be understood to mean that Kant limits philosophy in order to make room for theology. When Kant talks of “faith” here, he does not mean religious faith, but rather what he will later call “rational faith”: transcendental philosophy’s own claim to truth. Kant’s relationship to religion is much more ambiguous than a binary division of faith and knowledge suggests, [End Page 1325] since for him philosophy is both theology’s antagonist, against which it must defend its autonomy, and its inheritor, claiming to take over its vocabulary and functions.

Kant’s philosophy of religion has more recently found renewed interest from rather different angles. In Kant Studies, Kant’s impact on theology has been a recent topic of debate, specifically the question whether that impact was mostly negative or whether he indeed developed a coherent and affirmative theory of religion (Firestone and Palmquist). But Kant has also figured prominently in broader debates. Jacques Derrida refers to Kant in order to assess the return of the religious in our time; according to him, the “Kantian gesture” of self-limitation – “a certain epoché that consists – rightly or wrongly, for the issue is serious – in thinking religion or of making it appear ‘within the limits of reason alone’” – actually avoids entangling itself in false dichotomies like faith and reason or democracy and fundamentalism (Derrida 1996, p. 8). Jürgen Habermas characterizes the foundational role of religion in Kant’s thought as marked by an “epistemic dependence of the philosophical conceptualization and theorization of the source of inspiration of religious tradition”; moreover, he treats Kant’s philosophy of religion as paradigmatic of the rational “appropriation” of religious ideas, an appropriation that deserves re-examination at the present, for it alone may save an unchecked modernization from its drive towards self-destruction (Habermas 234). We have to ask, however, whether this very appropriation is not rather the source of ambivalence towards religion that with Kant and since Kant has been deeply inscribed in modern thought.

This ambivalence is not easy to recognize. A certain vulgarized Kantian conception of religion is now so completely taken for granted that the original Kantian gesture has become invisible. While the modern concept of religion bears Kant’s imprint, its origins do not lie within Kant’s philosophy. They can be traced back instead to Neo-Kantianism and the cultural and religious sciences that were founded under its influence around the turn of the 20th century. A fundamental reflection on religion in modernity must therefore begin systematically and historically prior to this idea of religion. It must, as Leo Strauss already implored in 1935,

first of all and at the very least climb back down onto the level of the classical quarrel between Enlightenment and orthodoxy, as onto a level on which the struggle was done and could be done about the one, eternal truth, since there the natural desire for truth had not yet been stifled by [End Page 1326] the newer dogma that “religion” and “science” each has in view the “truth” belonging to it.

(Strauss 24)

In other words, if we want to understand Kant’s radical restatement of the relation between religion and philosophy, we cannot simply understand it in terms of the successfully implemented and now seemingly self-evident Neo-Kantian concept of religion, but have to think of it in terms of the debate from which it emerged.

Conceiving the relationship between philosophy and theology as a “quarrel...

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