Moral Regeneration and Divine Aid in Kant

Abstract

Kant is often viewed as the exemplar of the Enlightenment tendency to reduce religion to morality, to eliminate religious appeals to mystery or to supernatural action, and to insist – in Kant's own words – that weourselvesmust make ourselves ‘into whatever, in a moral sense, whether good or evil’, we are to become. His entire philosophy in some ways epitomizes what Hans Blumenberg has called the ‘project of self–assertion’, the ‘essence of which [can be] formulated as the “program of antidivine self–deification”’. For if the centerpiece of Kant's philosophical vision is human autonomy, and if the implicit point of a Kantian view of morality and religion is to equate salvation with the individual achievement of virtue, then there seems to be little role left for a heteronomous grace or divine act to play.