Lectures on the Essence of Religion, and: The Essence of Faith According to Luther (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 101 the elements of all our cognition," and, "though all our knowledge begins with experience , it does not follow that it all arises out of experience." The senses contribute the "matter" of experience, but it is the understanding that makes "the representation of an object possible at all." Kant speaks vaguely of experience as "a synthetic combination of intuitions." The thrust of his argument is that "experience is possible only through the representation of a necessary connection of perceptions." It is "constitutive," however, only when "informed" through sense perceptions. So far Kant has identified experience with the particulars of sense perception. But there is another interpretation in the first Critique. As Kant puts it, there is "only one experience in which all perceptions are represented as in one thorough-going context according to law." In this sense, the term 'experience' can be used only in the singular: No matter how many perceptions may be "given," their interconnections occur only in one and the same experience. But this thesis of the singularity of experience is rather strange in light of Kant's initial position. Still, he explains it as the "totality concept" and the "context" of all perceptions. Kant's favorite expression is "field of experience" (CPR, B 13); and in this sense experience is the ground which supports the progress in human cognition. He who proceeds on this basis is "in the world." Kant himself formulates the principle of the unity of experience as the exclusion of everything that destroys the unity of the form of experience. The context of the perceptual objects is complete, thanks to the principle of causality; and this principle is constitutive of nature. Kant thus states that "nature is the one and only all-inclusive experience taken as the totality and the context of appearances." Nature is thus conceived as nothing other than the all-inclusive concept and context of a singular experience. It follows that a sphere beyond experience in this sense is conceivable but not knowable. The idea of an absolute whole of appearances is inherently contradictory; for the whole itself is not given, but given as a task. That is to say, it is a regulative idea of experience. Part IV of Holzhey's book is concerned primarily with problems of a philosophical anthropology and adds nothing of significance to the arguments already presented. The author does not take into consideration the arguments of the Opus postumum. But it is clear from what has been presented that the development of Kant's thinking, as related to the problem of experience, moves from an essentially Humean position to something radically different. The book under review gives us a step by step progression of this development and thus places our interpretation of Kant's transcendentalism in a new light. We now see the progression of Kant's thoughts as a progressive coming to terms with the problem of what experience really is. For the students of Kant's philosophy, neglect of this book would therefore be a serious blunder. W. H. WERKMEISTER Florida State University Lectures on the Essence of Religion. By Ludwig Feuerbach. Trans. by Ralph Manheim. (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1967. Pp. xv+ 359. $9.50) The Essence of Faith According to Luther. By Ludwig Feuerbach. Trans. by Melvin Cherno. (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1967. Pp. 127. $4.50) In these two translations readers of English now have, respectively, the richest overview of his thinking about religion that Ludwig Feuerbach wrote and the only 102 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY essay that he devoted to interpreting a particular theologian. There is more to these volumes than this, as I hope to show. First, though, I wish to note a Gestalt in which they seem to be involved. Suddenly, in the late 1960s, more writings by Feuerbach have appeared in English than appeared in over a century after Marian Evans published her rendering of Das Wesen des Christenturns in 1854. A translation of Das Wesen der Religion appeared in 1873, the year after Feuerbach died. (That brief essay of 1845 is the basis from which he developed the above Lectures.) It was not until 1966...