Dennis Auweele

Liberal democracy has been experiencing a crisis of representation over the last decade, as a disconnect has emerged from some of the foundational principles of liberalism such as personal freedom and equality. In this article, I argue that in the third part of Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason we can find resources to better understand and counteract this crisis of liberal democracy. Kant gives a powerful argument to include an invisible ethical community under a political community, and this ethical community has to take the form of a church. Kant argues then that any political system, and so also liberal democracy, requires religion to ally citizens in a foundational way with the general principles of that system. This would commit liberal nations to having their foundational principles buoyed by religion. Towards the close of the essay, I attend to how this might impact on liberalism’s commitment to religious and ideological pluralism.

Most philosophers do not read Kant’s philosophy of religion as providing a foundation for Christianity, or even as in line with it. Recently, however, a number of so-called “affirmative Kantians” have argued that Kant’s philosophy of religion explicitly aims at recovering the spirit of Christianity. In this article I scrutinize this claim with regard to Kant’s conceptualization of “grace” as a supplement to his moral theory. Contrary to these “affirmative Kantians,” I argue that Kant’s account of grace stems from Kant’s moral pessimism, not from any sense of the shortcomings of human beings in fulfilling their duties or the religious need for supernatural cooperation. Kant’s concept of grace tries to moderate this pessimism by providing what is needed for the possibility of moral progress. But simply by the way in which Kant regards grace as a rational concept needed for his moral theory, it seems to me that his philosophy of religion runs counter to certain central convictions of Christianity.

The work of the later Schelling seems antithetical to that of Nietzsche: one a Romantic, idealist and Christian, the other Dionysian, anti-idealist and anti-Christian. Still, there is a very meaningful and educative dialogue to be found between Schelling and Nietzsche on the topics of reason, freedom and religion. Both of them start their philosophy with a similar critique of the Western tradition, which to them is overly dualist, rationalist and anti-organic. In response, they hope to inculcate a more lively view of reality in which a new understanding of freedom takes center stage. This freedom can be revealed and strengthened through a proper approach to religion, one that neither disconnects from nor subordinates religion to reason. Religion is the dialogical other to reason, one that refreshes and animates our attempts to navigate the world autonomously. In doing so, Schelling and Nietzsche open up new avenues of thinking about freedom, reason and religion.

Schelling’s later philosophical thought and Schopenhauer’s philosophy undeniably have a Kantian pedigree. Their respective philosophies have had their major impact, however, in the late nineteenth century and twentieth century. For reasons that are both historical and systematical, the later Schelling (after 1809) and Schopenhauer were not deemed valuable interlocutors in the post-Kantian debates of the early nineteenth century. The reason for this, I argue, is that they go against the idealistic flow of the times. Instead of developing Kant’s positive concept of autonomy as self-grounding reason (such as Hegel), they expand Kant’s notion of a free arbitrariness (Willkür; most often translated as power of choice). I wonder: When one goes against the flow, does one then not return to the source? In this paper, I show how Schopenhauer and Schelling (1809–1815) both start from Kant’s negative concept of freedom and develop a way to experience such freedom through a non-conceptual intimation.

sThe salience of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels for philosophical reflection is undeniable. By providing a myriad of often dialectically mediating perspectives on certain subjects, he can serve as a rich fount for philosophical polemic. Many readers have been prone to confine the philosophical import of Dostoevsky’s prose to such a polyphony of dialectically interacting perspectives. In this article, this topic is taken up with a focus on the differing points of view on human salvation espoused by the protagonists of The Brothers Karamazov. It will be argued that Dostoevsky held to a view that only through certain existential struggles the human agent can attain a full-blooded experience of redemption. This argument will be made from the dialectical development of predominantly Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov.

Kant’s concept of grace in Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason is a difficult topic, exegetically speaking. Obviously enough, Kant subscribes positively to a notion of divine assistance. This appears awkward given his rationalist ethics rooted in personal autonomy. This has given cause to interpreters of Kant’s philosophy of religion – both early commentators and today – to read Kant’s account of grace is uniquely rationalist. This would make grace a rational expectation given personal commitment to good works. The argument of this paper is that grace is a hyperrationalist element in Kant’s practical philosophy because of the potentially problematic consequences of Kant’s views of human nature. Human nature is namely not particularly prone to be responsive to the rational moral law and therefore requires a number of pedagogical tools that facilitate moral agency.

Schelling’s views of evil in Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom is usually thought of as a radicalization of Kant’s argument for the propensity to evil in human nature in Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason. In this paper, I argue that Kant does not provide a full transcendental deduction for the ground of evil in human nature because this would give a rational reason for there to be evil, Schelling provides a theological–metaphysical reconstruction of Kant’s argument by providing a non-rational ground for evil and the difference between Kant and Schelling lies in how they conceive of the actualization of the ground of evil—through intelligible deed or protohistorical choice—which has repercussions for how they think of conversion.