Social Theory in Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone

Abstract

The present article argues: that to support the primary aim of Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, which is to establish the primacy of practical reason for religion (and thereby to criticize the subversion of religion qua supra-moral “ecclesiastical faith”), Kant elaborates and assigns to it a social ethics. Contrary to the tired adage that without religious foundation ethics must collapse, the reverse is actually the case: without ethical foundation religion must collapse, degenerating into dogmatism, superstition and fanaticism. To ground and concretize the link between ethics and religion Kant elaborates a three layered “anthropology” of human sociality upon which religion builds its communities (“church”) wherein holiness consists above all in the solidarity of ethical striving to achieve virtue for each and justice for all. Despite his good intentions, however, and independent of the question of the legitimacy of ethical religion, Kant fails in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone owing to the imposition of a debilitating formalism owing to an undiminished allegiance to the epistemological strictures and structures—the Transcendental Idealism—of the Critique of Pure Reason.