Abstract
This paper explores the implications of Manfred Kuehn’s observation that Kant’s claim in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason that the ethical community must be a community under God seems “a bit strained.” After clarifying Kant’s train of thought that results in his conception of the ethical community in the form of the “visible church,” the paper argues that the seemingly strong religious dimension may be misleading. If we understand the ethical community to be the development of the kingdom of ends in the Groundwork , it becomes apparent that Kant’s notion of God’s “sovereignty” over the ethical community is a shared sovereignty lodged in rationality and not in God’s own will. The “strain” that Kuehn senses thus suggests the potentially gratuitous nature of Kant’s references to God’s sovereignty over the ethical community. Despite the initial appearances, Kant’s account of the ethical community in the form of the visible church is, over the long term, closer to a secularizing move than to a robustly religious one.
Highlights
This paper explores the implications of Manfred Kuehn’s observation that Kant’s claim in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason that the ethical community must be a community under God seems “a bit strained.” After clarifying Kant’s train of thought that results in his conception of the ethical community in the form of the “visible church,” the paper argues that the seemingly strong religious dimension may be misleading
At one point in his distinguished biography of Immanuel Kant, Manfred Kuehn summarizes Kant’s account of the ideal ethical community, a community that Kant himself depicts as a veritable “kingdom of God on earth.”
In surveying this section of Kant’s late work, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kuehn correctly notes that “Kant goes on to argue that such a community needs to be understood as a church,” or a people of God
Summary
As Kuehn’s biography reminds us, Kant develops his account of the visible church as the institutional locus of an ethical community in Part Three. Toward a system of well-disposed human beings in which, and through the unity of which alone, the highest moral good can come to pass” (RGV 6:97-8; emphasis added) This duty is sui generis, because of the distinctive way in which the moral agent’s individual obligation becomes inseparable from its obligation to the entire community of rational beings, without whom the individual’s moral strivings are both insufficient and incomplete. “ethical community is conceivable only as a people under divine commands” (RGV 6:99), he affirms, subsequently adding that we must conclude that such a community “under divine legislation is a church” (RGV 6:101; emphasis Kant’s) He initially depicts the church in what is its ideal or noumenal form as “not the object of a possible experience” but, instead, as “the church invisible” offering “the mere idea of the union of all upright human beings under direct yet moral divine world-governance” (RGV 6:101; emphasis Kant’s). The “church visible is the actual union of human beings into a whole that accords with this ideal” (RGV 6:101)
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