Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason

XXI

played, without the latter's name being mentioned (139, cf. p. XXVII f.). True religion harbors reverence for the sublime, but not fear and anxiety; "from which nothing but fawning and insinuation can arise instead of a religion of good conduct" (109) Kant argues that trying to "win over" God through rituals rather than being a better person is a corruption of faith.. It consists not in false humility, self-contempt, whining repentance, and a "merely passive state of mind," but in a vigorous confidence in one's own power to resist evil (123). — God, freedom, and immortality are the highest tasks of metaphysics, which, however, are to be solved not in a theoretical but only in a practical way (465 ff.) Kant famously "denied knowledge to make room for faith," meaning we cannot prove these things with science, but we must assume them to act morally.. All our knowledge of God is only symbolic (257), the concept of God is merely a hypothesis for the knowledge of nature (460), a regulative principle A "regulative principle" is a rule that helps us organize our thinking about the world, rather than a description of an actual object we can see or measure. (365), a subjectively necessary maxim (367). Even the moral argument is intended to "provide no objectively valid proof of the existence of God, nor to prove to the skeptic that there is a God," but rather that, "if he wishes to think in a morally consistent way, he must include the acceptance of this proposition among the maxims of his practical reason" (424 note). — Natural theology knows no "articles of faith" and "confessions" (458 note), whereas "governments have gladly permitted" religion to be "richly supplied with images and childish apparatus" in order to be able to "treat their subjects as merely passive, more easily" (125) Kant suggests that complicated religious rituals are often used by states to keep citizens from thinking for themselves..

6. Alongside the three main works, the smaller writings of the period 1784–1791 offer nothing essentially new, yet they do provide some interesting individual contributions to our theme. First, the three treatises from the Berlin Monthly [Berliner Monatsschrift] from the years 1784 and 1786.

a) The article: What is Enlightenment? (December 1784) is in so far a precursor to the first preface to Religion within [the Boundaries of Mere Reason], as Kant already makes the distinction here between the clergyman as an official of the church, a teacher of the congregation and the catechism, who must adhere to the symbols In this context, "symbols" (Symbole) refers to the official creeds or confessions of faith of a church, such as the Augsburg Confession. of his church,