05.01.08

Kant one step ahead of the evangelical horde

Posted in religion at 7:01 pm by nemo

James comments on Science, atheism, and metaphysics:

Somehow I don’t think that evangelicals reflect Kant’s subtle views

Right-O, but actually there is a branch of Kantians trying to invade Kant-Studien for evangelicals: check out Stephen Palmquist (type Kant in Google, and his large site is somewhere in the top five to ten), and the Kant-L at yahoo (after the old original pre-yahoo Kant-L was shutdown, in part to escape my clutches, sorry) was for a while little more than an evangelical kant list.

It is worth considering (and the eonic materials, especially the third edition) Hegel’s remark that he was the completion of the Protestant Reformation. That seems a bit presumptuous, but his point is apt. Between the Reformation and the phase of German Classical Philosophy we see a unity as the revolution in religion issues in the modern age, next to science, and then is taken to a new level of intellible discourse by the sudden and mysterious explosion of philosophy, especially Kant. You can, of course, argue that the completion of the completion takes off, on the one hand, in direction of Schopenhauer, evocative of Buddhism, and on the other (beside Hegel) Feuerbach (and the biblical critics, socialists, etc,, of the 1840’s), thence downshifting into scientism. The peak moment seems to be Kant to me, although the gesture of Hegel, whatever you think of him, tackled more directly with the actuality of religion confronted with modernity.
I don’t buy it, but Hegel’s gesture shows his ‘boast’ to be in some fashion correct: Protestantism moves thusly to an abstraction that sublates beyond theism and atheism (’spirit, Geist’???) to end in a dialectical mystery evocative of non-dual Vedanta, etc,…
If you look at figures like Tillich (and he is but one instance) or even Kiergergaard, the influence of this ‘upgrade’ is obvious.
I should think then that Protestants (and Christians) ought to wonder if they aren’t still frozen in time, and the ‘religion within the limits of reason’, to use Kant’s phrase, has passed them by, only to be trampled by the persistent momentum of traditionalist mobbing of modernity, Newton’s third law of religious idiocy.
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Kant’s views on theism have deprived too many of the insights he gives into metaphysics. I am not a theist (or atheist or agnostic) and don’t bat an eyelash at the theistic formalism that emerges from his ethical theory. It seems unfortunately however that vestigial religious concepts got an upgrade that traditionalists can’t appreciate. Kant’s remarks on ‘faith’ settle the question, but tend to fall back into sub-orbital religiosity using Kantian language.
Schopenhauer must have noted the theological cooptation of Kant and thought it fitting to strip the whole vestigial conceptual structure of theological jargon away from transcendental idealism.
Actually, to me, Kant is a clever atheist who saw fit in the context of his own time to recast theism into something that wasn’t really theism. But the point is a battle for the body of Patroclus, witness the activities of the Palmquist gang who wish to recast Kant as a religious traditionalist.

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