Brandon Love

While Kant is often seen as agreeing with Lessing’s ditch, this paper argues that Kant provides his own version of the ditch between the historical and the rational. Lessing’s ditch concerns rational truths revealed in history; Kant’s version is more focused on the realization of rationality within history. Kant agrees with Lessing that rational truths are necessary and historical truths are contingent and dispensable. However, Kant views human nature as containing a weakness such that the historical might always be needed for the recognition of the rational. Kant divides his treatment of Christianity into natural/revealed and natural/learned. Considering a religion as natural/revealed concerns its origin and essence. Kant deals with Christianity as natural/revealed in Parts One–Three of _Religion_, finding harmony between historical Christianity and rational religion, going so far as to say that the universal church originated with historical Christianity. Considering a religion as natural/learned concerns how the religion is spread. Kant deals with Christianity as natural/learned in Part Four, saying that Jesus taught simply natural religion; later forms of Christianity are learned religion, in which the historical should be seen as a means, serving the rational end. Due to the (current) need for the historical, Kant allows for a drawbridge connecting the historical and rational, even though the rational does not rely on the historical for validity. Kant is uncertain of the future development of human reason, so he is unsure if the drawbridge can ever be raised, leaving us with only the rational.

In the Table of Nothing, Kant includes a discussion of space and time, under the heading of relation. There, he says that space or time is an ens imaginarium, as an empty intuition without an object. Space and time are something, namely forms required for human intuition, but they are nothing in themselves that can be intuited. When we think of Kant’s broader discussions of space and time in terms of the Table of Nothing, certain puzzles emerge. The most prominent of these is the relationship between space and time as transcendentally ideal and as empirically real. This chapter argues that Kant is talking about empirically real space and time in the Table of Nothing, and likewise it is empirically real space and time that serve as the ground of experience. Transcendental ideality, rather than providing the conditions for experience, is merely a negation of transcendental reality. Paying attention to this distinction illumines contours of Kant’s notion of the transcendental. Kant often discusses the transcendental in metaphysical terms, and he is often concerned with warding off such a use of transcendentality. This is true of not only space and time, but also the categories and Kant’s discussion of previous ontology. To make my case for the fundamental importance of empirically real space and time, I look at the Table of Nothing, Kant’s statements of transcendental idealism and transcendental realism, his explanation of ideality and reality in the Transcendental Aesthetic, and then compare these statements with his talk of the transcendental misuse of the categories (which have only an empirical use).