Not Praying to An Idol: Kant and Kierkegaard on Prayer

Abstract

Not Praying to An Idol:Kant and Kierkegaard on Prayer Dennis Sansom (bio) According to Nelly Viallanex, one of Soren Kierkegaard's motives in writing about prayer is to keep people from praying to an idol. "Prayer is supposed to establish a relationship with the true God and not with an idol that would usurp the name."1 I would also say this is true of Immanuel Kant's writings about prayer. Both seem to be aware of what we might call the "philosophical problem" of prayer: 1. God is infinite, eternal, limitless, perfect, and uncorruptible, hence sui generis. 2. We are historically finite and limited both by what our cognitive abilities enable us to know, unaware of our myriad biases. 3. Because of number one, we cannot know the being of God. 4. Because of number two, we are not cognitively or psychologically equipped to pray to God. 5. If we maintain that we pray to God, we contradict numbers three and four. 6. Therefore, to pray actually to God, we must affirm the truths of numbers one and two while overcoming the restrictions of numbers three and four. Kant argues that we cannot do number six, whereas Kierkegaard believes we can. The difference between them is not necessarily that they have different views of God but that they differ on what happens in prayer. I want to explain the reasons Kant and Kierkegaard differ on prayer and why Kierkegaard's account of how we can communicate with God in prayer, even in our profound limitations, does not suffer the confines Kant puts on prayer and that it may satisfactorily respond to the philosophical problem of prayer. To clarify why Kant and Kierkegaard explain prayer the way they do, I position their accounts within their overall systems, within the core claims that drive their thinking, for their estimations of prayer derive from basic convictions underlying their philosophical thinking. KANT ON REASON AND PRAYER Kant pursued a number of philosophical topics—for example, the relationship between theoretical and practical knowledge, the possibility of synthetic [End Page 90] a priori knowledge, conceiving how the noumenal might be known in the phenomena—but one of the most important might be found in the tension between the stretching and retreating actions of reason.2 Even though amazingly complex in its development, Kant's explanation of pure reason follows a simple process. We first experience objects through intuitions about their place within the world (that is, how they fit spatially and temporally), then we conceptually understand those experiences according to a priori categories such as quantity, quality, relations, and modality, and finally, we attempt to bring unity to our experiences by formulating comprehensive ideas through the synthesizing work of reason.3 However, this great accomplishment of reason reflects a strain within its operations—it both stretches towards metaphysical claims about the whole of experiences that might inform us, for example, about the soul, the world, and even God, but, driven by its own operating restriction that all concepts must be based on experiences, it retreats from articulating such conclusions. Reason tries to unify what we understand about the world into a concept, resulting in it being driven by what Kant calls the "ascending line,"4 in which we keep trying to incorporate into more comprehensive concepts what we must assume conditions our knowledge of the world. In fact, this pursuit is a "requirement of reason,"5 which compels us "to hypostatize this idea of the sum-total of all reality"6 and even to consider there may be archetypical "ideals" (recalling Plato's ideals) that provide reason. Reason "with a standard, which enables it to estimate, by comparison, the degree of incompleteness in the objects presented to it."7 Thus, we cannot completely abandon the prospects of metaphysics.8 Yet, because all purely rational ideas must emerge from how we experience objects spatially and temporally, and because we do not experience such things as the soul or archetypical ideals, we must resist conferring ontological reality to these metaphysical claims. We cannot presume that the hoped-for imaginative, archetypical ideals would "furnish rules or standards for explanation or examination."9 In fact, in comparison to...