Kant’s Squabbling Children: Conflicting Thinkers Base Themselves on the Same Texts

Any philosopher — which is to say, any philosophical text — if it is much read at all, will find itself as the real or alleged foundation for conflicting schools of thought. Radical empiricists and Scholastic Thomists both claim Aristotle as their heritage. Triumphant nationalist imperialists and Marxist-Leninists both claim Hegel as their father.

This is certain true of Immanuel Kant, as Norbert Hinske writes:

Selten ist ein Buch so gegensätzlich aufgenommen und verstanden worden wie Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Diese Gegensätze lassen sich bis in die ersten Jahre nach Erscheinen des Werks zurückverfolgen.

Not only do competing philosophical schools claim Kant as their foundations, but separately, there are competing interpretations of Kant — interpretations which are incompatible with each other. Hinske cites how Moses Mendelssohn understood Kant to be one whose influence was primarily destructive: Kant’s analysis was, for Mendelssohn, a skepticism which dismantled nearly everything.

Will man auch nur die äußersten Pole jener schwierigen Rezeptionsgeschichte markieren, so kann man auf der einen Seite Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin nennen. Gleich im „Vorbericht” seiner Morgenstunden oder Vorlesungen über das Daseyn Gottes spricht er 1785 von dem „alles zermalmenden Kant”, und er fügt ein paar Seiten später hinzu, er hoffe nur, daß dieser „mit demselben Geiste wieder aufbauen wird, mit dem er niedergerissen hat”.

Mendelssohn was primarily concerned that Kant’s texts would promote atheism. This would have surprised Kant, who considered himself a theist. But Mendelssohn was not alone in considering Kant as dangerous to faith.

Yet the opposing view — that Kant’s writings were edifying to faith, and supported not only theism, but a robust theism — was embraced by a group of theologians, who saw Kant as a bulwark against materialism. These enthusiastic admirers of Kant were grouped largely in the university in Jena.

They reasoned: if Kant, as they read him, showed that pure reason alone could not demonstrate the existence of God or the immortality of the soul, then it was also true that he showed that reason could not demonstrate the opposite. The early Kantians in Jena saw Kant as removing rational argumentation from the arsenal of the atheists. Kantianly, one could not demonstrate that God doesn’t exist, and one could not demonstrate that there is no immortal soul.

The theologians in Jena argued that, if Kant’s pure reason was undecided on these questions, then practical reason would open the door for a Moraltheologie, in which God would appear as necessary.

It is clear that even during Kant’s lifetime — both Moses Mendelssohn and the early Kantians in Jena were active in the 1780s — Kant was both seen as a dangerous skeptic whose texts fostered atheism and seen as formulating a philosophy which removed reason and rational argumentation from the atheist’s arsenal.