Sárospataki Füzetek 2. (1998)

1998 / 1. szám - Dr. Frank Sawyer: Is there a place for God int he inn of Philosophy?

However, Kant’s emphasis on the ability of reason to follow the moral law is at the same time his great weakness. There is no such thing as ’universal’ or ’common’ reason, for people use their reason to defend many different perspectives! Kant’s over-confidence in reason, for example in RELIGION WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE, prevents him from accepting the real impact of revelation from God. Grace from God is seen as something that hampers human autonomy. Kant allows room for grace, but it is a rather weak grace, based on the merits of our good intentions. So here we find in Kant a deistic-moral approach which in modern philosophy soon had no answer to hold back strong atheistic ideas based on human autonomy and freedom. What Kant built was like an arch without a keystone to hold it together.1 His separation of the noumenal and phenomenal meant that reason and faith cannot walk hand in hand anymore. The idea of ’pure reason’ (reine Vernunft) seems to disqualify any other kind of knowledge, especially the knowledge which might be based on divine revelation. Yet having disqualified knowledge which does not come from pure reason, Kant goes on to accept the need for ’practical reason’ which posits more than we can prove. This points to Kant’s dualistic problem as well as his rich understanding of the great questions of philosophy.

For Kant, the finite mind is not able to reach the infinite. This would later become a theme of existentialism, and influence Karl Barth, for example. But there is a difference: while Barth agrees with Kant’s critique on ’natural theology’, he emphasizes God’s revelation, while Kant leaves us largely imprisoned by our finitude. We are isolated from ever knowing the Dinge an sich (things-in-themselves). Since true reality as a Ding-an-sich is not really knowable, it is no wonder that Fichte and others following Kant abandoned this idea - with the consequence that they lost the balance which Kant tried to achieve and fell into a one-sided subjectivity.

ZV. 'JranJe cS awyer

'Theodore M. Greene’s introduction to Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Limits os Reason Alone (Harper Torchbook, New York, 1960), p. Ixiv. zPaul Tillich, Perspectives on 19th and 20th Century Protestant Theology (SCM Press, London, 1967).

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