The Internality of Moral Faith in Kant’s Religion
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Addison Ellis
Abstract
Wood (1970) convincingly argues that Kant’s notion of moral faith is a response to a “dialectical perplexity” or antinomy. Specifically, moral faith is a response to the threat of moral despair. In line with this suggestion, I make the case that moral faith is the resolution of a crisis about how to go on with one’s life in the face of the threat of moral despair. If this is right, then we have a potential solution to two related anxieties: (1) why the matter of our moral faith or despair deserves to be a topic of practical philosophy instead of empirical psychology, and (2) how despair could be a real threat even though Kant holds that rational beings could never truly lack faith. But, to fully see how these concerns can be answered, we must go beyond Wood’s initial analysis. I first argue that Kant’s philosophy suggests two kinds of moral faith: external and internal. I then argue that internal moral faith is analogous to self-contentment (Selbstzufriedenheit) in the second Critique’s practical antinomy. Together, these arguments suggest that moral faith is a response to a real threat of moral despair, and that both dialectically require one another within practical reason.
© 2018 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Topics of the Kant Yearbook 2019, 2020 and 2021
- Titelei
- Table of Contents
- The Internality of Moral Faith in Kant’s Religion
- Kant’s Critical Argument(s) for Immortality Reassessed
- Evil, the Laws of Nature, and Miracles
- Kant’s post-1800 Disavowal of the Highest Good Argument for the Existence of God
- Kant on Contradiction, Conceptual Content, and the Ens Realissimum
- Kant’s Debt to Baumgarten in His Religious (Un‐)Grounding of Ethics
- The Ideal of the Highest Good and the Objectivity of Moral Judgment
- Predication and Modality in Kant’s Critique of the Ontological Argument
- God, Hypostasis, and the Threat of Paradox: Exploring Kantian And Non-Kantian Reasons for Circumspection
- Hidden Antinomies of Practical Reason, and Kant’s Religion of Hope
- List of Contributors
- Topics of the Kant Yearbook 2019, 2020 and 2021
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Topics of the Kant Yearbook 2019, 2020 and 2021
- Titelei
- Table of Contents
- The Internality of Moral Faith in Kant’s Religion
- Kant’s Critical Argument(s) for Immortality Reassessed
- Evil, the Laws of Nature, and Miracles
- Kant’s post-1800 Disavowal of the Highest Good Argument for the Existence of God
- Kant on Contradiction, Conceptual Content, and the Ens Realissimum
- Kant’s Debt to Baumgarten in His Religious (Un‐)Grounding of Ethics
- The Ideal of the Highest Good and the Objectivity of Moral Judgment
- Predication and Modality in Kant’s Critique of the Ontological Argument
- God, Hypostasis, and the Threat of Paradox: Exploring Kantian And Non-Kantian Reasons for Circumspection
- Hidden Antinomies of Practical Reason, and Kant’s Religion of Hope
- List of Contributors
- Topics of the Kant Yearbook 2019, 2020 and 2021
