Sárospataki Füzetek 2. (1998)

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

S7s fiiere a pface for Siód..?

rationalism, empiricism, pietism, and so forth. Kant’s strength was that he took these challenges seriously, and indeed tried to go beyond these categories.

Kant grew up under pietist influences from which he took a distance later on. Kant experienced the Bible teaching, prayers, catechism study and other expressions of religion at the pietist school he attended as quite wearisome. Throughout his life he never felt much positive appreciation for Christian worship or other expressions of personal faith. But Kant knew the main teachings of Christianity and thought about how to relate faith and reason. He was influenced by Protestant values, for example, in his strong sense of duty, truthfulness, and hard-working attitude toward life, as well as his frugality. He studied theology as well as philosophy. The question behind much of his major philosophical writings is the knowability of God and the limits of human reasoning. It is noticeable that while Kant kept developing and maturing as a philosopher, he did not keep developing his understanding of theology to the same degree. Kant could speak of metaphysics as ’a dark ocean without shore and without lighthouses’. While Kant did not pay much attention to worship services and prayer, he always ended up talking about God when he thought about the need for morality. At the same time, a major theme for Kant was mankind’s enlightenment. He says: ’Enlightenment is the departure of mankind from its self-incurred blame of immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s reason without the direction of another... Sapere aude! Take courage to use your own understanding!’1 That was Kant’s view of the Enlightenment. He added that no church should try to use dogma to restrict human enlightenment.

After Descartes, the two major schools of philosophy, rationalism and empiricism, concerned themselves with the problem of knowledge. Kant tried to unite and get beyond rationalism and empiricism. Beginning with Kant the view of the philosophical task underwent a great change. No longer could philosophers talk about the insights of reason without first of all defining the possibilities and limits of reason. After Kant both faith and reason enter a crisis: they no longer have clear a priori definitions. Kant did not want to say much as a philosopher about transcendent things (God, the soul), so he spoke in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781) about a

Kant’s Werke (Groszherzog Wilhelm Ernst Ausg.),Bd.I, p.163: "Aufklärung int der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit. Unmündigkeit ist das Unvermögen, sich seinen Verstandes ohne Le'itung eines Anderen zu bedienen...Sapere nude!

21