1 Introduction: Politics, Religion, and the Scope of Kant’s Critical Project

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is generally placed among the most influential proponents of the European Enlightenment and its core values, such as human dignity, freedom of inquiry and expression, and individual moral autonomy. During most of the twentieth century, the prevailing interpretation of Kant’s philosophy located the main line of inquiry in his enterprise for determining the scope and the limits of human reason – an enterprise he named a “critique” – principally within the field of academic philosophy known as epistemology. It was thus taken to be an effort to provide an account of how and what humans beings are capable of knowing truly and with certainty about the world and about themselves as participants in the world. This interpretation accordingly views the central outcome of Kant’s inquiry, which he first sets forth in his monumental Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 2nd edition 1787), as a claim about the limits of human knowledge: genuine human knowledge is restricted to the field of objects that, inasmuch as they present themselves to our human senses under the conditions of space and time, can be represented by our cognitive capacities in accord with the necessarily connected conceptual patterns (“categories”) that our reason provides us. In less technical terms, this claim means our human cognitive capacities can yield genuine knowledge only for those objects and principles that are part of a world of “matter and motion,” i.e., the material world that is physically measurable in reference to space and time.

This claim about the limits of genuine human knowledge accordingly provides the basis upon which Kant then elaborates in subsequent writings a critical philosophy that radically undercuts the long-standing philosophical enterprise of “metaphysics.” That enterprise sought to articulate a comprehensive conceptual account of all that exists, including whatever may exist in ways that “transcend” the physical world and thus stand “outside” the limiting conditions of space and time. Such efforts at metaphysics, which are traceable as far back as Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient Greek philosophers, were represented in Kant’s time in the rationalist systems elaborated by thinkers such as Gottfried Leibniz, Christian Wolff, and Alexander Baumgarten. These rationalist systems of metaphysics also were proposed as the basis upon which one could reason philosophically to (at least a limited) knowledge of realities that stand beyond the limiting conditions of space and time, such as God, the immortal human soul with a capacity for freedom, and the basic principles of morality, such as good and justice. These rationalist systems of metaphysics thus served as one of the chief targets against which Kant directed his construction of a “critical” account of human knowing. In many versions of this account, Kant’s critical philosophy heralded “the end of metaphysics,” an intellectual program espoused by various philosophers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and that continues in the twenty-first.Footnote ¹

The rendition of Kant’s philosophy I briefly elaborate here has been “standard” in the sense that it has frequently served as the narrative “backbone” of the account of Kant given in textbooks and lectures in university courses in “modern” philosophy, a period most often taken to comprise the span from René Descartes in the seventeenth century until Kant and (at least) some of his nineteenth-century successors.Footnote ² A variety of elaborations and additions can be made to this basic narrative, many of which take account of the importance and influence of aspects of Kant’s philosophy other than epistemology, most notably his writings on morality and ethics. Yet even those accounts may tread lightly when it comes to presenting the systemic and conceptual connections among all the topics that were of concern to Kant in the course of his elaboration of the critical project during the 1780s and 1790s. A particularly challenging connection to articulate adequately is the relationship between, on one hand, the writings in which Kant’s account of the limits of human knowing are seen as undermining the claims of metaphysics and, on the other hand, the writings in which he articulates the moral demands that he takes reason to place in no uncertain way upon our human moral intention and agency. In the former, the concepts of human freedom, the soul, and God are treated, in view of the limits critical philosophy requires us to place on human knowledge, as extravagant illusions leading to seemingly insuperable contradictions (“antinomies”);Footnote ³ in the latter, Kant sees the unconditional demand of moral duty (the “categorical imperative”) that reason unmistakably places upon our conduct as providing a firm and indisputable basis upon which human reason may then confidently affirm what he terms the “practical reality” of the “transcendental ideas” of human freedom, the soul, and God.Footnote ⁴ Kant’s account of morality and its implications thus seems to restore the very objects, i.e., human freedom, the soul, and God, that his critique of metaphysics had proposed were beyond the reach of our human knowing – a criticism Kant himself encountered during his lifetime.Footnote ⁵

One particularly influential form of this “backbone” narrative has taken the lasting philosophical significance of Kant’s work to lie in the way in which his critical articulation of the limits of human knowing has become the wrecking ball that demolishes not just the rationalist metaphysics of his day but also the entire enterprise of Western speculative metaphysics. A number of problems occur with this version of the narrative, not the least of which is that Kant himself continues to use the term “metaphysics” to designate certain portions of his critical project. A notable instance is The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), among the last of the book-length works published during Kant’s lifetime as part of the critical project. Enough other evidence certainly exists for Kant’s continuing use of the term “metaphysics” to indicate that, whatever else the critical project had as its purpose, it was not to demolish metaphysics root and branch.Footnote ⁶ It was rather to reform metaphysics into an enterprise more modest in scale, a scale appropriate to one of the fundamental aims of Kant’s project: to give appropriate recognition to the limited, finite character of human reason and its use, particularly in view of a human tendency to overstep those finite limits.Footnote ⁷

Accounts of Kant’s enterprise that take the cognitive delegitimation of metaphysics to be its most significant result (and perhaps even its intended outcome), however, provide little positive scope for then connecting this reading of its main trajectory with the larger constructive and systemic expectations that Kant articulates for his enterprise within its very advocacy of a more “modest” metaphysics. Kant sees the critically disciplined use of reason – one that recognizes both the importance and the limitations of the deeply embedded human “disposition” to metaphysics – as continuing to have a fundamental and necessary bearing upon the full range of human inquiry and activity.Footnote ⁸ These include, but are not limited to, ethics, history, religion, politics, anthropology, aesthetics, education, and culture, all of which Kant indicates have integral connections with the project of constructing a critical philosophy. A number of places in Kant’s critical writings indicate that, in addition to the fundamental importance that the enterprise of critique has for reason’s governance of human moral activity and ethical inquiry, two other fields of human activity for which a critique of reason is of crucial significance for reason to exercise proper governance are religion and politics.Footnote ⁹ This suggests that an account of the overall trajectory of Kant’s project of critique needs both to identify the place that these forms of human activity and inquiry have within the larger critical enterprise, and to characterize how their specific functions within that enterprise bear upon one another.

It is thus within the context of rendering the scope of Kant’s critical enterprise as having a horizon more encompassing than that provided by the task of overcoming, by dint of epistemic rigor, the rationalist school metaphysics of his age, that this Element articulates an account of the role that his philosophy of religion and his political philosophy play within that enterprise. It does so by identifying the basis from which the fundamental trajectory of the critical project – i.e., its central focus on the anthropological questions of what it is and what it means to be human – squarely places both forms of inquiry, and the human activities from which they arise, within the ambit of that project; this anthropological focus, moreover, also locates them in a way that shows the integral link they have to one another as elements of Kant’s critical enterprise.

In the background of this question about the connections linking these two particular elements within Kant’s critical project is a larger one that has long vexed scholars and students of Kant’s work: to what extent does Kant succeed in articulating and justifying his oft-made claim – and his even more frequently operative presupposition – that it is one and the same finite reason that humanity employs both for understanding the natural workings of the world (“theory”) and for living morally in that world (“practice”)?Footnote ¹⁰ One telling sign that Kant was not all that successful in making a convincing case for the unity of reason among those who have placed themselves among his philosophical followers is that there seems to be little expectation in the philosophical community that being a “Kantian” moral philosopher then commits one also to being “Kantian” in, for instance, one’s epistemology, philosophical anthropology, metaphysics, or philosophy of religion – or vice versa. Given that the jury is still out – and is likely to remain out for a long time – on the question of the adequacy of Kant’s treatment of the unity of reason, this Element does not attempt to resolve this larger question as it sets forth an account of the more specific relationship between Kant’s philosophy of religion and his political philosophy. Note, however, that its treatment of this specific relationship works from an interpretive presupposition that seeks to respect Kant’s operative commitment to the unity of reason and to identify the elements in his treatment of religion and of politics from a critical standpoint on which such unity has a bearing.

Against the background of a long-standing interpretive preoccupation with the cognitive strictures that Kant’s critique places upon metaphysical inquiry, it is hardly surprising that his writings on religion and politics have often been treated in relative independence from claims that bear upon the unity of critical reason. One consequence of this has been that the main interpretive issues that arise in reading these texts on religion and politics are often not framed from a perspective attending to what their roles might be within his larger critical enterprise. Instead, the interpretive focus turns to issues that, as important as they may be in their own right, are not always pertinent to what, as I argue, Kant sees as the overriding concern that gives shape to his critical writings and to the bearing that concern has upon his claims about the unity of human finite reason. This concern is not, as the standard interpretation often has it, to limit – if not to eliminate – human claims to possess metaphysical knowledge. It is, instead, a far more encompassing concern for understanding our humanity and its relation to the world in which we dwell and act. This concern, with roots stretching back to the earliest origins of Western philosophy, makes Kant’s critical project one that is at root anthropological: it seeks to enable us to articulate, first of all, a sound understanding (which is also constitutively a self-understanding) of what makes “us” – embodied, finite knowers and agents who are integrally part of a material world that works in accord with laws of natural necessity – distinctively “human.” The articulation of such a sound self-understanding of our humanity, moreover, is not simply a descriptive (“theoretical”) achievement telling us what “kind” of being we are in relation to other “kinds” in the world. Such a critical self-understanding of our humanity also provides a frame of reference from which we can then articulate the normative (“practical”) points of reference that our humanity enjoins upon us for directing our ways of living in this world with one another in a human community.

One shorthand way to characterize this central concern informing Kant’s critical enterprise is that it aims to make us self-aware of “the human place in the cosmos” as the locus from which reason enjoins upon us to live out a distinctively human “moral vocation”: this vocation is to make “the highest good in the world” possible through the exercise of our human reason. When viewed from this anthropological framework, which bids humanity to participate in the achievement of the highest good in the world, Kant’s writings on religion and on politics can be seen as both integrally a part of the critical project and closely connected to each another. Their connection with one another has its basis in how they each serve as mutually supportive elements of the social and historical dimensions of the critical project: they have complementary roles for what Kant sees as the social and historical unfolding and accomplishment of humanity’s moral vocation in the world through the exercise of reason. Both their connection with one another and their role in the critical project are specified by their serving as interrelated but distinguishable elements for the social and historical enactment of what Kant envisions as a cosmopolitan human community.

On Kant’s account, the historical instantiation of such a community provides the locus for humanity to work together to provide the moral and political conditions for making “the highest good in the world” concretely possible. Chief among these conditions is the construction of a cosmopolitan world political order for establishing an enduring peace among nations; in the historical construction of that order, moreover, politics and religion have complementary roles in setting the social conditions that will make enduring peace possible. In consequence, the larger anthropological trajectory of the critical project, which aims toward articulating the distinctive place of humanity in the cosmos, may be said to have as one of its important outcomes the articulation and the legitimation of human efforts to enact peace-making on a global scale. Such efforts constitute a concrete marker for what Kant’s critical philosophy assigns as the moral vocation of humanity in history and in these efforts, religion and politics each play an important role in the formation of the social dynamics constitutive of enduring peace.Footnote ¹¹

My argument proceeds in three stages. The first stage, “Kant’s Critique as Anthropology: The Duality of Human Reason in the World,” proposes some of the key considerations that indicate that there are good reasons, based on Kant’s texts, for enlarging the fundamental scope of the critical project beyond the epistemological and metaphysical concerns that have often preoccupied Kant’s interpreters. This expanded scope is an anthropological one; it arises from Kant’s efforts to articulate and resolve what he takes to be a fundamental duality at the core of our humanity. At one level, this duality is experiential: we are aware of being inextricably part of a cosmos governed in accord with universal physical laws of its material nature and, at the same time, also inextricably participants in a world of human interaction whose social and historical trajectory requires governance by human agents through the mutual exercise of their moral freedom. At another level, the duality is one that we can articulate reflectively in terms of the conceptual contrast between the necessary operations of “nature” and the autonomy of (human) “freedom.” The locus of that tension – both experiential and reflective – lies within humanity itself, and Kant’s critical project sees this polarity as arguably irresolvable, that is, as long as human reason does not subject itself to the self-limiting discipline he terms “critique.” The urgency in resolving this duality provides the critical project with its core intellectual and moral energy: Kant takes this polarity between nature and freedom, as humanity both experiences it and reflexively engages it in the exercise of reason, to constitute the historical and social locus in which humanity is called upon to enact its moral vocation to serve as the very juncture that enacts nature and freedom into unity. The unity of reason thus is not a predetermined given; it is, instead, a project for human enactment, a project that extends throughout the course of human history.

Working from the presupposition that such an anthropological turn provides a sound interpretive background for Kant’s critical enterprise, the second stage, “Critique and Cosmopolitanism: The Anthropological Shaping of Religion and Politics,” considers key elements in, respectively, Kant’s philosophy of religion and his political philosophy. These elements have often been controverted, but, as I argue, when these controversies are reexamined with an eye toward the larger anthropological trajectory of the critical project, they provide pointers toward the complementary roles that critically shaped politics and religion have in that project: they function as central historical and social modalities through which humanity enacts its moral vocation.

In the case of religion, I situate Kant’s account along an anthropological trajectory that, even as it still attends to epistemic issues arising from specifically Christian doctrines, focuses on a dimension of religion that is more fundamental for its role in the critical enterprise than is doctrinal exactness. This dimension consists in the role that religion, in the modality of “hope,” plays in humanity’s moral vocation, as the juncture of nature and freedom, to enact “the highest good in the world” as “the ultimate end” of human reason.Footnote ¹² Kant takes “hope” as marking the function of religion as it is construed “within the boundaries of mere reason”: hope enables humanity to envision the concrete contours of “the moral world” that is to be enacted in history in virtue of the unitary workings of critically disciplined human reason. Hope functions by envisioning “the world as it would be if it were in conformity with all moral laws” (CPR A808/B836) in the context of the distinctive social and historical conditions that are a central part of humanity’s unique status as an embodied and finite rational species. Hope enables the envisioning of such a world in the form of an “ethical commonwealth” that enacts the social dynamics of a thoroughgoing mutual respect of one another’s freedom.Footnote ¹³

It is of crucial importance for understanding Kant’s articulation of hope to recognize that, from the earliest stages of the critical project, he takes the ambit of the hope that reason critically enables us to hold to be one that is a thoroughly social one: hope bears upon our humanity not simply individually – as would be the case if its only focus were on the happiness proper just to my individual virtue – but also in and through our relationality to one another in a moral community constituted in the recognition and the exercise of our mutual freedom.Footnote ¹⁴ The social images he uses consistently throughout the critical project (“kingdom of grace,” “kingdom of ends”) offer one striking marker of this. The image that he uses in Religion, the “ethical commonwealth,” is of particular significance since it serves as an apt bridge for linking what Kant recognizes as the distinctively moral, political, and religious “inflections” of human community in service of concrete human efforts to participate in the enactment of the highest good.

In politics, Kant’s proposal for the establishment of an international order to bring about a state of enduring peace – which is arguably the element of his political philosophy that has shown remarkable staying power as a point of reference for efforts to establish transnational rules and structures to curb armed conflict – is similarly repositioned along an anthropological trajectory. This trajectory is similarly indexed to the enactment of the highest good in the world as “the ultimate end” of human reason in a thoroughly social form. Two elements in Kant’s proposal are of particular importance for this anthropological repositioning. One is that Kant’s identification of the establishment of such an international order for enduring peace as “the highest political good” brings the project of perpetual peace into his wider articulation of the ends of reason and the central place these ends hold in the moral vocation of humanity. The second is that this project is itself part of Kant’s larger envisioning of a cosmopolitan world order as a fundamental social mode for the instantiation of the highest good in the world. From the anthropological trajectory of the critical project Kant’s cosmopolitanism can be understood as an overarching articulation of the distinctive social and historical vocation that is fitting to humanity’s unique status as an embodied and finite rational species. In virtue of this status, humanity lives out its vocation as a species within the concrete historical workings of society and culture; it does so by exercising its moral freedom to bring about the individual and social conditions that conjointly make historical progress toward attaining “the highest good” possible. Chief among the social conditions for historical progress toward such good is one that emerges from the dynamics of human political activity and whose establishment concretely takes a political form: the constructing of a cosmopolitan world political order for establishing an enduring peace among nations.

The argument that this second stage makes on behalf of the bearing both religion and politics have upon the human enactment of the ultimate end of reason thus also indicates their role in Kant’s discussions of the overarching aim of the critical enterprise. These discussions do not just point to the large anthropological question – What is humanity? – at the heart of the critical enterprise. They also frame that question in terms that locate its religious dimension and its political dimension in reference to the task of enacting the highest good in the world. A cosmopolitan world order for enduring peace and the ethical commonwealth thus provide, respectively, the political and the religious “inflections” in which human reason articulates the social shape of the highest good in the world as the human enactment of the ultimate end of its finite reason.Footnote ¹⁵

The third and final stage, “The Ethical Commonwealth: Social Imperative for Cosmopolitan Peace-Making,” of this Element’s argument for the integral connection that Kant makes between religion and politics focuses on the role that “hope,” a key element in his account of religion, plays in that connection. Hope provides a horizon from which to extend Kant’s account of the establishment of an international cosmopolitan order for enduring peace beyond the ambit of the political, the field for external and enforceable regulation of the conduct of nations. I argue that this extension can be made in terms of his account of the dynamics of the ethical commonwealth, the central social element of his account of critically disciplined religion. These dynamics serve as the locus within which “the true Church,” as “the moral people of God,” can play a role in the historical establishment of peace among the peoples of the world (Rel. 6:98–102, 115–124).

The extension I am proposing here thus arises on the basis of construing the (political) enactment of a cosmopolitan order of lasting peace as enabled through the exercise of human freedom that has been socially empowered for peace-making. Social empowerment arises from the hope for effective human participation in the enactment of the highest good in the world, the hope that is the focus of the (religious) dynamism of the mutuality of freedom constitutive of the ethical commonwealth. This social empowerment for peace-making thus serves as the locus within which religion and politics play complementary roles in the concrete historical attainment of the cosmopolitan end of human reason that is envisioned in the critical project: a social empowerment for peace-making arises from the perspective of the hope that is the religious inflection of the moral dynamism of the ethical commonwealth.

Relative to the overall anthropological trajectory of the critical project, a complementary religious rendering can be appropriately given to the establishment of a cosmopolitan world order for peace that Kant envisions in political terms in “Perpetual Peace” (1795). The attainment of this highest political good for humanity can be rendered religiously as the social and historical instantiation of empowerment of the moral freedom made possible by the mutual respect constitutive of the social dynamics of the ethical commonwealth. Such empowerment provides humanity with a horizon of hope from which to envision possibilities for effectively overcoming the concrete forms of human social divisiveness that lie at the root of war and thereby creating conditions for the establishment of enduring peace.Footnote ¹⁶ This empowerment – which Kant sees modeled in religious terms by the life and death of Jesus that “most strikingly displays the contrast between the children of heaven and the bondage of a mere son of earth” (Rel. 6:82) – makes it possible to consider the efforts of human freedom exercised on behalf of a cosmopolitan world order for peace as also appropriately rendered religiously as a fundamental element for human participation in the (moral) work of God, which is the work of bringing about and sustaining peace.

2 Critique as Anthropology: The Duality of Human Reason in the World

Here I set forth the first stage of the argument for the integral connection between religion and politics in Kant’s critical project. I begin with a brief overview of the philosophical context in which Kant undertook this project that serves to identify elements that played a role in bringing to the fore the question of human knowing as the primary frame of reference for subsequent interpretations of his work. Against this backdrop, I examine some key considerations in Kant’s texts indicating that, at work in his efforts to insure the certitude and validity of human knowing against strong currents of cultural and philosophical skepticism, is a more fundamental concern. The concern is anthropological, focused on understanding what it means to be human in the finite conditions and circumstances that constitute us and the world in which we dwell with one another.

Central to this stage of the argument is a discussion indicating how this anthropological trajectory arises from Kant’s efforts to articulate and resolve a fundamental duality between “nature” and “freedom” that stands at the core of our experience and our reflective self-understanding of our human dwelling in the world. The outcome of Kant’s efforts to resolve this duality indicates that humanity is itself the crucial juncture upon which nature and freedom converge. In consequence, the resolution of this duality is a distinctively human task, one that Kant construes as humanity’s moral vocation. This vocation is one humanity is called upon to live within the finite conditions of both the determinate natural causality of the material world and the concrete historical workings of society and culture as arenas for the exercise of human freedom. In concrete terms, this vocation enjoins humanity to exercise its moral freedom to bring about the individual and social conditions that conjointly make historical progress toward attaining the highest good in the world possible.

Immanuel Kant published his three Critiques in the years 1781–1790. During that same period, and well into the decade of the 1790s, he produced what are arguably the most significant of his writings on religion, politics, history, and human culture.Footnote ¹⁷ None of these works was on the monumental scale of the Critique of Pure Reason, the first work of his critical project; neither did they offer accounts comparable in scope to the comprehensive systemic claims that Kant made in the set of Critiques, claims made with the intent of articulating and legitimating the proper uses of human finite reason in its intertwined activities of knowing the world, governing conduct morally, and making judgments of beauty and purpose. Kant raises fundamental questions about the scope and limits of human knowledge at the outset of the first Critique and insistently purses them throughout its more than 800 pages. His responses to these questions and the consequences these have for the full range of the uses of human finite reason provide the context from which he then engages the two other activities of reason he sees as correlatively fundamental to that of knowing: reason as it functions in governing our conduct morally, the focus of the Critique of Practical Reason, and reason as it functions in our making judgments of beauty and purpose, the focus of the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Against this background, it is hardly surprising that the other writings Kant produced during this period, in which he continued to elaborate his critical philosophy while also responding to the friendly and the hostile criticism it evoked, have been most often read and understood from a perspective that gives interpretive primacy to the fundamental questions about human knowing from which he set the initial trajectory of critique.

From this perspective, the three Critiques are taken to articulate Kant’s comprehensive response to what had become in the course of the eighteenth century a chronically troubling crisis over the underpinnings and the certainty of human knowledge. This crisis had earlier taken a decisive turn in the efforts of René Descartes to respond to the radical skepticism within the intellectual culture of post-Reformation Europe. He did so by locating the underpinnings of knowledge in the self-enclosed cogito (“I think, therefore I am”) of the individual human subject as it proceeds methodically from certainty of its own existence as “a thinking thing” to an overcoming of the most radical doubt about the reality of God and the external world by a method of reasoning in accord with rules modeled on the rigor of geometrical logic. Neither Descartes’s efforts, however, nor the efforts of other thinkers who followed various currents in his wake, fully resolved the crisis. In fact, the crisis deepened during the following century and a half, particularly in the face of the calmly articulated skeptical arguments proposed by David Hume to undercut the intelligibility of taking an examination of the contents of the consciousness of a stable “self” to be sufficient as a firm foundation for human knowledge.Footnote ¹⁸

There can be little dispute that Kant takes the task of addressing questions about the manner and reliability of human knowing, as well as about the dynamics of the knowing human subject, to constitute central elements for the philosophical undertaking to which he gives the name “critique.” From this stance, Kant’s critical philosophy is an extended exercise in epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge, and, in keeping with “the turn to the subject” that Descartes made the basis for a philosophical resolution of the quest for human cognitive certainty, is a project focused on the individual knower as the prime locus of human cognitive subjectivity.Footnote ¹⁹

In recent decades, however, studies of Kant’s philosophy have proposed that this focus on the individual human subject as its fundamental point of reference may be too constricted to do justice to the central ambitions of Kant’s philosophical project, particularly when it provides the sole lens through which to read the whole body of Kant’s texts.Footnote ²⁰ These works have explored possibilities of a more expansive understanding of Kant’s works, ones that offer what might be considered, in contrast to the close-in focus on questions of the adequacy of human knowledge, a wide-angle, panoramic lens on the scope and method of the enterprise of critique. The view from this lens seeks to encompass the multifaceted human engagements with the world that, on Kant’s account, serve as the loci in which human reason empowers our activities of cognitive inquiry, moral governance of action, and aesthetic and purposive judgments.Footnote ²¹

Seen from this more expansive focus, the central concern driving Kant’s critical work may no longer be considered simply that of justifying human knowing. That concern may now be located as part of a larger project: an anthropological one that aims to understand how we are constituted as properly and distinctively human, both in and by all the activities we govern by our reason, and also by being an integral part of a material world governed by principles of nature.Footnote ²² Kant’s enterprise of critique thus is concerned not only to articulate and to legitimate the scope of human knowing in the face of skeptical attacks but more fundamentally also to understand the shape and the structure of all the interrelated activities of our finite reason as they function as central to what constitutes us as human in the cosmos in which we dwell.

From this anthropological focus, the aim of Kant’s critical philosophy is then not merely to resolve the crisis of human knowing in European philosophy that Descartes’s works helped to precipitate in the mid-seventeenth century. It has a more expansive scope, one from which Kant can address the question of what constitutes us as human by framing it in reference to the distinctive status that he sees conferred upon humanity by the possession and exercise of human reason in its multiple functions. It is a status that Kant sees arising from a duality fundamental to humanity’s placement in the world as an embodied and finite rational species and the consequences of this placement for the exercise of our finite reason.

On Kant’s account, this duality presents itself to us as the twofold manner in which we must perforce engage the world, both as knowers and as moral agents, in the use of our reason. On one side, which Kant designates “theoretical,” reason enables and impels us to “think” the world: reason drives and serves our efforts to understand comprehensively the workings of the material world, including ourselves as thoroughly part of that world. Reason does this as a capacity by which we articulate the rules (concepts) and the systemic interconnection of those concepts (laws) as principles for the intelligible ordering of the workings of the world and of the interaction of all that is in the world. On the other side, which Kant designates “practical,” reason impels and enables us to determine ourselves as moral agents in the world of human interaction. The world thus presents itself not just as a field for understanding (theoretically) the principles ordering its material working but also as a field for interaction (practice) that originates from the distinctively human moral self-governance of freedom that Kant calls “autonomy.”

On Kant’s account, this duality of the exercise of human reason is a marker of the fundamental duality of a humanity that at once dwells in a cosmos governed in accord with the necessary workings of universal physical laws and in a world of human interaction whose social and historical trajectory takes concrete shape under the governance of autonomous human agents. The cosmos of material nature and universal physical laws thus provides the field for the theoretical use of human reason, while the world of human interaction, whose social and historical trajectory is shaped by the moral freedom of human agents, constitutes the field for the practical use of human reason. A fundamental point of textual reference for Kant’s articulation and exploration of this duality – but by no means the only one – is located in his extensive treatment of the “Third Antinomy” in the Critique of Pure Reason and his commentary on its resolution (CPR A444/B472-A451/B479; A462/B490-A476/B504; A532/B560-A558/B586). There he presents this duality as one that pits the causality of nature and the causality of freedom in dialectical tension with one another. The crucial role that this tension between nature and freedom plays in the unfolding of the critical enterprise is significantly underscored by Kant’s later observations in the preface to the work that offers a second installment on the critical project, Critique of Practical Reason (1788). At the very outset of this text, he notes that the aim of the second Critique, i.e., showing “that there is pure practical reason,” will also show that “transcendental freedom is also established” (CPrR 5:3) – a point that he then directly references to the duality of nature and freedom articulated in the third antinomy of the first Critique. He specifically observes that, in the second Critique, freedom is established “in that absolute sense in which speculative reason needed it, in its use of the concept of causality, in order to rescue it from the antinomy into which it inevitably fails when it wants to think the unconditioned in the series of causal connection” (CPrR 5:3).

The systematic importance of establishing this concept of freedom is further emphasized in the next paragraph by Kant’s claim that “the concept of freedom, insofar as its reality is proved by an apodictic law of practical reason constitutes the keystone of the whole structure of pure reason, even of speculative reason” (CPrR 5:3–4). These remarks on the systemic importance that the relationship between nature and freedom has for the critical project, though phrased in abstract terms at the outset of the second Critique, significantly resonate with the concrete image Kant employs at the end of this work to evoke how human beings reflectively understand themselves as standing in a fundamental duality. The duality consists in the relation we have, on one hand, to the world of nature that (outwardly) presents itself to our senses and, on the other hand, to the world of human moral interaction that takes shape through the inner determinations of our freedom. The image Kant uses, moreover, points to the evocative power each relation has with respect to our human reflective self-understanding: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” (CPrR 5:161).Footnote ²³

These are two of the significantly placed passages from Kant’s writings that suggest a particularly appropriate way to characterize the anthropological trajectory of the critical project: it is a trajectory that lies along coordinates locating humanity itself as the crucial juncture upon which nature and freedom converge. On this view, Kant’s critical enterprise may then be understood as an effort to articulate, by examining the structures and operations of human reason, the distinctive place humanity thereby occupies in the cosmos: humanity itself – and in particular the finite reason that humanity is called up to exercise in the world – constitutes the central locus upon which and in which nature and freedom converge. Within this anthropological trajectory, questions about the underpinnings and reliability of human knowing as it bears upon the workings of nature are quite significant; they do not, however, constitute the sole or final focus of Kant’s efforts to articulate, in a context marked by an expanding scientific knowledge of the world and a growing reflective awareness of the human dynamics of history and society, what it means to be human. Kant’s efforts to engage this anthropological question thus may be taken (unsurprisingly) to be evocative of a larger line of inquiry beyond the epistemological one dominant for much of modernity, a line of inquiry that goes back to the very origins of Western philosophy: the Delphic inscription “know thyself” that once served to propel Socrates’s practice of inquiry in Athens.Footnote ²⁴

This injunction gets writ large more than two millennia later in and for Kant’s critical project. For Kant, this injunction now bears upon the self-knowledge of humanity not only as individuals but also as a whole, a humanity that he, as an advocate of enlightenment, sees as ready to take up the task of coming of age, a task in which the self-reflective enterprise of critique has an important role.Footnote ²⁵ In consequence of this ambition of Kant’s project, the Delphic injunction no longer bears just upon self-knowledge of one’s own soul but also upon the self-knowledge of a humanity that has become more reflectively aware of its distinctive status and role both in the material cosmos and in the sociocultural dynamics of human history. It is no longer an injunction just for an individual soul that strives, in its Platonic guise, to ascend from the shadows playing upon the wall of the Cave to reach full illumination in light of the Good or, in its Aristotelian guise, to secure, in the manner of the unmoved divine first substance, the inner and outer conditions for self-sufficient philosophical contemplation of first principles. It has become an injunction that, in the critical form Kant gives to it, now bears upon humanity as a species, not just individually; it indicates that there is an ineradicable social dimension to the human self-knowledge that emerges from critique. Such socially attentive self-knowledge now also stands included in the task that reason calls upon humanity to undertake along a trajectory that takes concrete historical shape through the exercise of human moral freedom.

This account of humanity’s distinctive moral vocation as the juncture of nature and freedom thus serves to enlarge the interpretive frame for Kant’s critical enterprise into an anthropological one. Within this frame, humanity serves as the juncture of nature and freedom to the extent that it recognizes and lives in accord with the limits and the ends that “critique” self-reflectively places upon the use of finite reason as it governs human theoretical and practical engagement with the cosmos. The enterprise of critique thus plays a key role in reason’s governance of our human engagement with the cosmos: critique, on Kant’s account, is constituted by humanity’s free undertaking of the self-discipline of reason, a self-discipline that enables the proper articulation of the limits and the ends of finite human reason. Such self-discipline is needed inasmuch as humanity lives out its moral vocation within the finite conditions of both the determinate natural causality of the material world and the concrete historical workings of society and culture; in the absence of this self-discipline, reason’s engagement with the finite conditions of its human exercise is subject to various forms of “transcendental illusion,” both theoretical and practical, that deflect it from the trajectory leading to its proper end.

This task is one Kant articulates in a number of texts as the highest good possible in the world, a good that he indicates takes shape in consequence of humanity’s participation in the historical accomplishment of the unity of nature and freedom as the final end of humanity’s use of reason. Participating in the accomplishment of this good, as this Element argues, constitutes the distinctive moral vocation that reason enjoins upon humanity. This vocation will be shown to consist concretely in humanity’s exercise of its moral freedom to bring about the individual and the social conditions that conjointly make historical progress toward making possible the highest good in the world. Chief among the social conditions for historical progress toward such good is constructing a cosmopolitan world political order for establishing an enduring peace among nations, a task for which politics and religion are called upon to play mutually supportive roles. In short, the larger anthropological trajectory of the critical project that aims toward articulating the distinctive place of humanity in the cosmos may be said to have as one of its important concrete outcomes a political one: the legitimation of the project of peace-making on a global scale as a central mark of the moral vocation of humanity in history.Footnote ²⁶

On Kant’s account, bringing about an order of lasting peace among peoples through human freedom exercised in mutual respect for one another is thus central to the accomplishment of this human vocation. In establishing lasting peace, humanity will bring freedom and nature together as a fitting moral accomplishment. This is an accomplishment that emerges from a human culture that has been reflectively shaped in accord with the exercise of self-governing practical reason. Kant specifically designates this state of international peace as “the highest political good” (MM 6:355) – it is the accomplishment of a definitive order for the external and enforceable regulation of the conduct of nations in relation to one another that bars them from resorting to force of arms as a mode for the settlement of disputes arising among them. While not in itself sufficient for the achievement of the entirety of the highest good for humanity, it does serve as both a social marker for and a necessary element in the enactment of the full and final achievement of that good.

Within the context of Kant’s overall articulation of humanity’s moral vocation, I think that there is reason to extend Kant’s account of the significance of the establishment of an international cosmopolitan order for enduring peace beyond the ambit of the political, the field for external and enforceable regulation of the conduct of nations. Although the establishment of an international order for enduring peace will be a political achievement, it is also an achievement in which the social dynamics of critically disciplined religion have a role to play. I believe that this role can be articulated in terms of Kant’s account of the dynamics of the ethical commonwealth, the central social element of his account of critically disciplined religion. These dynamics exhibit the steadfast recognition and respect for the full mutuality of our human freedom that provides a moral horizon for a cosmopolitan world order. They might even be characterized, as is explicated in the last section, as standing as the polar opposite of the image Thomas Hobbes used in his depiction of humanity’s “state of nature”: a field of constant warfare in which we all are set against one another (bellum omnium contra omnes) in endless zero-sum opposition in which there are, always and inevitably, “losers.” In contrast, the dynamics of the mutuality of human freedom in the realm of ends that Kant envisions as an ethical commonwealth serve, not as an engine for conflict, but as the enabling conditions for “the true Church,” as “the moral people of God,” to play a significant role in the historical establishment of peace among the peoples of the world.Footnote ²⁷

The extension I propose arises on the basis of construing the establishment of a cosmopolitan order of lasting peace through the exercise of human freedom to be the external political counterpart of the moral community, the ethical commonwealth, that Kant envisions as the “true church” founded in moral hope. This community emerges from and is empowered by the “moral faith” – i.e., the hope – that humanity can make concretely possible a full social enactment of the mutuality of human freedom in the workings of history; in terms of a long-standing Christian theological image, such full enactment of the mutuality of human freedom in history could be considered to instantiate “the kingdom of God on earth.”

Construed in these terms, this suggests that the establishment of a cosmopolitan world order for peace, as a moral demand upon humanity, has religious as well as political significance. A world order based upon a mutuality that orders the external relationships among human national communities (and is thus political) into a stable condition of peace would indicate a social empowerment of human moral freedom that, on Kant’s account, reaches its complete instantiation religiously as and in the full mutuality of moral recognition empowering agents in the ethical commonwealth. The ethical commonwealth provides the social empowerment that humanity requires in order to overcome the forms of social divisiveness that lie at the root of war. In this way, the ethical commonwealth comports well with another long-standing image, that has its roots in Hebrew scripture, that envisions a “peaceable kingdom” as fundamental feature of the social dynamics that constitute the kingdom of God (Is. 11:1–9; 65:17–25). This social empowerment, which takes form as the ethical commonwealth, thus stands as the polar opposite of Hobbes’s “state of nature,” in that the encountered difference of the “other” evokes recognition and welcome, rather than erasure and opposition. This empowerment – which Kant sees modeled in religious terms by the life and death of Jesus that “most strikingly displays the contrast between the children of heaven and the bondage of a mere son of earth” (Rel. 6:82) – then makes it possible to consider the efforts of human freedom exercised on behalf of a cosmopolitan world order for peace to be rendered religiously as human participation in the moral work of God.

3 Critique and Cosmopolitanism: The Anthropological Shaping of Religion and Politics

Here I present the second stage of the argument connecting religion and politics in Kant’s critical project. It begins with a “snapshot” of Kant’s philosophy of religion that focuses on an issue that has long vexed his critics and commentators: What is his attitude and assessment of Christianity? Should Kant be considered a friend or a foe of Christian doctrine and practice? This important question touches upon a number of substantive philosophical and theological issues about evil, sin, freedom, and forgiveness. The purpose in making it the initial focus of this section, however, is not to offer a resolution of these issues; it is, instead, to present a “test case” for the consequences that making a shift to an anthropological perspective upon the critical project has for understanding and interpreting Kant’s treatment of religion. For purposes of this test case, moreover, it is useful to note that it is not making the claim that the “friend or foe” question is one that arises solely or even primarily in consequence of reading Kant from an epistemological perspective and/or as the herald of the end of metaphysics; it is a question that will continue to be consequential even when Kant’s account is interpreted, as it is here, anthropologically. This test case, instead, points to what often gets overlooked in Kant’s account of religion in consequence of too narrow a focus on its application to the specifics of Christianity rather than on his more fundamental concern: identifying the role that religion, as a human phenomenon, plays in the critical project’s efforts provides us with an enlarged self-understanding of our human place in the cosmos. What gets overlooked from this narrow focus are the very anthropological elements within his account of religion that help to locate the role this account plays within the larger critical enterprise as well as the features of Kant’s treatment of religion that provide important links to his political philosophy.

I then proceed to offer a similar snapshot of Kant’s political philosophy, focused on two related issues that have often divided commentators who engage with this part of Kant’s work. The main text at issue is Kant’s essay from 1795, “Toward Perpetual Peace,” in which he offers a proposal outlining the steps that nations of the world should begin to take for putting an end to warfare among themselves. Despite the details his proposal provides, it leaves unsettled the question of the precise form and structure that is to be given to the institutional arrangements needed to establish an order of enduring international peace. Was Kant envisioning the establishment of a single world government that would supplant the sovereignty of individual nations and remove the basis on which they legitimate their right to go to war? Or did he envision, instead, an association of still sovereign nations that would establish enforceable mechanisms to settle issues that previously led nations to resort to force of arms against one another?

Correlative to this issue about the concrete political structure Kant proposes for the achievement of perpetual peace is a second one that bears upon the extent to which he considered it to be even possible as an enduring human accomplishment. Did he envision such an order for peace as a stable and lasting condition that humanity could and would concretely achieve in history or, instead, only as an aspirational ideal for future generations to try, at best, to approximate. More specifically, did Kant take the establishment of a cosmopolitan world order – be it in the form of a “world state” or of a set of supranational bodies to adjudicate disputes between nations on peaceful terms – to be a historically achievable goal for humanity, a goal for which there might be measures or benchmarks for evaluating progress toward its accomplishment? Or was his proposal simply an ideal put forth as a “compass point” to encourage efforts at partial and ad hoc amelioration of the conditions that lead to war, even if they ultimately fail to bring about lasting peace?Footnote ²⁸

As in the case of the snapshot of Kant’s philosophy of religion, the goal of the discussion of these elements of Kant’s political philosophy is not to resolve these contested issues; it is, instead to use these questions as a test case from which to locate some of the important aspects of Kant’s political philosophy that bear upon the fundamental anthropological trajectory of the critical project. These then provide important points of reference for the work of the next stage of the argument (Section 4), which is to identify and articulate the points of connection and convergence that link religion and politics together in the larger anthropological trajectory of Kant’s critical enterprise.

4 The Ethical Commonwealth: Social Imperative for Cosmopolitan Peace-Making

This Element initially provided, in Sections 1 and 2, an overview of Kant’s critical philosophy as an anthropological enterprise that seeks to articulate the character and the significance of the moral vocation of humanity. That vocation arises from what Kant envisions as the unique status our species holds in the cosmos: humanity is called upon to serve as the juncture that links the causal workings of the natural world (of which humanity is a part) with the moral freedom that is fundamental to the structure and working of human personal agency and is thereby requisite for the operation and flourishing of human life in society and history. Our human engagement with the causal workings of nature and with the personal agency that we exercise in freedom are each under the governance of reason, the deeply rooted drive we have to make sense of the world. Our engagement with the causal workings of nature provides the field for the exercise of our reason as theoretical, in which we seek to explain “how the world works” and to do so in the most comprehensive terms. Our engagement with the world as a locus for human choice and action provides the field for the exercise of our reason as practical, for which we require reason’s judgments for discriminating between good and evil and right and wrong as norms for our agency’s determination of what to do and how to act. As is the case with the theoretical exercise of reason, practical reason seeks to make sense of the world, but does so in moral terms, terms that are referenced to good and evil and right and wrong; in seeking to make moral sense of the world, reason in its practical exercise also does so in the most comprehensive way, i.e., with respect to what Kant terms the highest good possible in the world and to our agency’s role in bringing about that good.

Both the theoretical and the practical uses of reason play a role in humanity’s efforts to fulfill its moral vocation, but in order for them to do so, they each need to be exercised in accord with a recognition of the limits that our finitude places upon the scope and the capacity of our reason in each of its uses.Footnote ⁵⁷ This recognition of the limits of our human finitude is the outcome of the reflective enterprise Kant calls critique, a project that he considers of vital importance for the proper accomplishment of humanity’s moral vocation to serve as the juncture of nature and freedom. In the absence of critique – the reflective recognition and acknowledgment of the limits that our finitude places upon the efforts of reason to make sense of the world (including our human place in that world as morally free agents) – our reason is subject to debilitating illusions. Among these illusions, the most debilitating, in Kant’s judgment, are those that, based on misunderstandings of the workings of our freedom in relation to the causal workings of the natural world, lead us to abandon as pointless or illusory our human efforts, be they individual or collective, to be good and to do good in the world and for the world. In the context of these temptations to despair of the value and the effectiveness of our moral efforts, the intellectual and moral discipline that Kant calls a critical metaphysics provides, in contrast, a basis for moral hope in the effectiveness of human action for the accomplishment of good: human beings can, in fact, be effective agents, both individually and in concert with one another, through the proper use of human reason in the concrete contexts of human society and history, in participating in the enactment of the highest good possible in the world. Kant takes the question of hope to be one that we necessarily pose out of a concern for the efficacy of the moral action that reason, in its practical use, enjoins us to do: “for it cannot possibly be a matter of indifference to reason how to answer the question, What then is the result of this right conduct of ours?” (Rel. 6:5). The question of hope for the efficacy of our moral conduct for the enacting of good thus provides a fundamental point of reference for the anthropological shape of Kant’s critical project. It is a point of reference that, as later discussion of the ethical commonwealth indicates, is drawn from the social character of our finite human moral agency and that bears crucially upon the role critically disciplined reason plays in orienting human political and religious activity to the enactment of good.

The anthropological reading presented here, with its focus on moral hope in the efficacy of human action, is offered as an alternative to what Section 1 termed the standard account of Kant’s philosophy, one primarily focused on questions of the possibility of genuine knowledge (epistemology) and of the fundamental character and order of the world (metaphysics) – with the greater weight most often given to epistemology. One consideration on behalf of exploring a different line of interpretation is that, given its strong epistemological focus, the standard account often neglects to provide an adequate and comprehensive basis from which to include other important elements in Kant’s work, such as his political philosophy, moral philosophy, philosophy of history and culture, and philosophy of religion, as an integral part of his critical enterprise. This is not an insubstantial consideration, in that there is evidence in Kant’s texts indicating that he took these elements to have an integral and important place within his larger project.Footnote ⁵⁸

So, in place of an epistemological focus that has, on more than one reading, become more narrowly construed than can be well supported from Kant’s texts, the anthropological one proposed here takes the following as the main concern driving Kant’s philosophical enterprise: what is the place, the role, the significance of humanity, and of what humanity does, within the larger cosmos of which we find ourselves a part? Framing Kant’s enterprise in terms of this question, which occupied most of Section 1, provided a basis from which we were offered, in Section 3, snapshots of his philosophy of religion and of his political philosophy to probe the extent to which this anthropological framework provides adequate and appropriate conceptual space for including them as integral to his critical project. Those snapshots offered reasons to think that both religion and politics (as well as their reflective philosophical counterparts) are integral and important for the anthropological work of Kant’s critical project to articulate the moral vocation of humanity and to enable humanity to participate as effective agents, individually and socially, in the enactment of the highest good.

This final section builds upon the case, illustrated in those snapshots, that Kant’s treatments of politics and religion are integral to his larger critical project, particularly in terms of its focus on the human role in enacting the highest good. From that starting point, this section explores the possibility that not only are those two accounts each integral to the critical project but that they also are complementary to one another. Their complementarity consists in the mutually supportive function they each have in identifying, articulating, and bringing into relation the concrete social character of those aspects of the final end of reason – the political and the religious – that fall within the respective provinces of their activity and reflective articulation as elements of critique as an anthropological enterprise. A central element offered in support of their complementarity is a proposal to extend the significance of the establishment of an international cosmopolitan order for enduring peace that Kant offers in “Perpetual Peace” beyond the ambit of the specific and widely encompassing political sphere of international relations to which it is directed as a plan for an external and enforceable structure for regulating the conduct of nations. This extension is posed by relating the dynamics of cosmopolitanism to those of the ethical commonwealth, the central social element of Kant’s account of critically disciplined religion. These social dynamics are presented as the locus within which the true Church, as the moral people of God, is called upon to play a role in the historical establishment of peace among the peoples of the world that is distinct from, but complementary to and supportive of, that played by a cosmopolitan political order.

The proposal for this extension thus argues that the establishment of the political structures for a cosmopolitan world order for peace may also be construed religiously in reference to the social dynamics of the ethical commonwealth as a key locus for overcoming forces of human divisiveness, particularly as it forms the dynamics of the conflict fundamental to the “state of nature” as a Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes. In this construal, the establishment of that external political order can be rendered religiously as a social empowerment of the moral freedom that is requisite in order for humanity to overcome the forms of social divisiveness that lie at the root of war. This empowerment – which Kant sees modeled in religious terms by the life and death of Jesus that “most strikingly displays the contrast between the children of heaven and the bondage of a mere son of earth” (Rel. 6:82) – makes it possible to consider the efforts of human freedom exercised on behalf of a cosmopolitan world order for peace not only to be directed to establishing new political structures for international order, but also to be the instantiation and enactment of human social participation in the peace-making that constitutes “the moral work of God.” Religion, on this account, has a distinctive role in human efforts to secure the order of peace as the highest political good; this role is to constitute a social space of human interaction that, purified of the self-preferential divisiveness constitutive of the “ethical state of nature,” empowers the enactment of the full moral mutuality that is requisite for enacting an enduring condition of peace.

This social space is constituted on the basis of what Kant proposes as arguably the most authentic form of human religious practice, i.e., the social dynamics of the ethical commonwealth. This practice originates from the enactment of the full mutual moral recognition constitutive of the social dynamic of the ethical commonwealth. That dynamic takes form as a socially oriented hope that enables us to envision the efficacy of the human enactment of good from the perspective of a moral faith focused beyond the outcome that the exercise of moral freedom has for an individual moral agent. The dynamic of social hope provides a larger horizon from which to view the efficacy of moral freedom, a horizon opening space for a human community to be empowered to live in full mutual moral recognition. In the ethical commonwealth, moral faith expands into a social hope that provides a social empowerment of its members to work in concert for the enactment of good in its fully social instantiations, of which a central one will be the establishment, in the political sphere, of an international order of enduring peace. Put in traditional Christian vocabulary, this horizon reorients the way “salvation” is understood and imagined beyond exclusively individual terms – “saving one’s soul” – to a more encompassing social horizon in which each one’s salvation is implicated in the salvation of all: one is (truly and fully) “saved” only if/when all are “saved.”

Religion, in the guise of such critically disciplined “moral faith,” thus not only enables human agents to hope in the moral efficacy of individual enactments of good; it also prepares human agents to envision themselves as members of an ethical commonwealth who are mutually responsible to one another and thereby are empowered to exercise their freedom as thoroughly and constitutively social. As mutually responsible members of the ethical commonwealth, human agents are called upon to exercise freedom not simply as it bears upon the hope they may have in regard to their own individual moral destiny (e.g., as hope for personal immortality) but also – and perhaps more fundamentally – as it bears upon the social outcomes of history and culture that bear upon the destiny of humanity as a whole. Included as a central element in these social outcomes is the cosmopolitan order of peace that Kant’s political philosophy envisions as the good toward which reason, in its juridical guise, points as an appropriate end and, indeed, as the highest political good.

To the extent that Kant’s account both of a cosmopolitan world order, which is central to his political philosophy, and of the ethical commonwealth, which is central to his philosophy of religion, arises from his understanding of human freedom as thoroughly and constitutively social, it suggests a deeper and more fundamental line of connection and complementarity between these two elements of his critical philosophy. There are indications of such a connection in his shorter writings on political history from the 1780s and 1790 as well as in his larger treatises from the 1790s, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and The Metaphysics of Morals. In these writings, an account of moral hope in the efficacy of human action for the attainment of good informs his discussions of a cosmopolitan perspective and its function in humanity’s role in shaping the trajectory of history. Kant articulates cosmopolitanism as a perspective, made possible by the practical interest of reason, from which human agents are enabled to render their activity morally intelligible, not just in terms of its role in making them individually worthy of happiness but also as that activity is an ingredient in the sociocultural matrix that constitutes the dynamics of history. From this outlook, human agents can construe the workings of their freedom as efficacious not merely with respect to their individual moral worthiness but also for a socially effective shaping of the historical trajectory of human society and culture as it is oriented to the enactment of the highest good possible in the world.

Cosmopolitanism may thus be construed as a social form of hope for the enactment of the highest good that Kant sees as having its origin in the practical use of reason. It enables us to envision that good as a social enactment of human freedom. On Kant’s account of the moral efficacy of human agency, only that good in which human freedom has a role in effecting can be properly considered a candidate for being the highest good for our humanity. Hope in its cosmopolitan, i.e., social, form provides human agents a way to envision the exercise of their freedom not simply as it bears upon their own individual moral destiny but also as it bears upon the social outcomes of human history and culture. It envisions the highest good attained through human freedom to pertain to humanity as a socially and historically situated species with a distinct and socially inflected moral vocation, not merely to each human agent as a separate individual.

In addition, this perspective envisions the exercise of human freedom, both individually and in concert with one another, as itself functioning to shape the social conditions in which human agency is exercised for attaining this good. The highest human social good is achieved not through a mere aggregation of individual efforts, coordinated by a moral analogue to preestablished harmony; it is achieved through each and every agent’s attention to the dynamics of the mutual respect due one another’s freedom in the interactions that shape the social conditions for dwelling with one another within the finite confines of our planet. In consequence, the role of a critically disciplined religion here can thus be framed by reference to the bearing that the dynamic of moral interaction marking an ethical commonwealth has upon aspects of the social character of cosmopolitan hope.

For instance, religion, in the form of the social dynamic of mutual respect enacted by members of the ethical commonwealth, sharpens attention to the responsibility we bear to and for one another in shaping all the social conditions for our mutual interaction in freedom, such as the external and structural political conditions of the kind Kant details in the preliminary and definitive “Articles for Perpetual Peace.” Religion, on Kant’s account in the third part of Religion, also moves, under the guidance of reason in history, on a trajectory from division to unity; he sees the multiplicity of particular ecclesiastical faiths slowly converging upon a critically disciplined religion that points toward a future in which the inner unity and universality that is an essential mark of “the one true religion” can become more publicly manifest (Rel. 6:121–124).Footnote ⁵⁹ On these matters, the full historical establishment of the ethical commonwealth, particularly with respect to the challenges of forming a manifest social unity that brings into cooperation and harmony communities of concretely different “historical faiths,” has important parallels to the establishment of an international order for securing lasting peace. This suggests that the forms of interreligious encounter, dialogue, and cooperation that have arisen in the past century – even as conflicts over religion still fester, at times quite violently – can be viewed from a cosmopolitan perspective as functioning as an important propaedeutic for the project of establishing an international order for enduring peace.Footnote ⁶⁰

The ethical commonwealth, as the context in which moral faith is empowered as a constitutively social hope, thus allows agents to envision this highest political good to be attained through their human freedom to pertain to their humanity precisely as socially and historically constituted as a species, not merely to each agent as an individual.Footnote ⁶¹ This suggests a way in which the attainment of a cosmopolitan order of enduring peace as the highest political good for humanity can be appropriately rendered religiously: it stands as the definitive social empowerment of human freedom, an empowerment that, by overcoming the social divisiveness that lies at the root of war, gives the lie to the Hobbesian depiction of “the state of nature” as bellum omnium contra omnes. To the extent that both the ethical commonwealth and a cosmopolitan world order envision the definitive social empowerment of human freedom for establishing an order of full human mutuality, they thereby disempower the social divisions and contentions at the root of war, the paradigmatic social form of radical evil. They jointly provide conditions for an enduring historical enactment of the social good that moral freedom makes possible by the mutual respect constitutive of the social dynamics of the ethical commonwealth.

The roles of the ethical commonwealth and of a cosmopolitan world order in empowering moral hope thus bear not just on individual moral empowerment and accountability. They also have a fundamental bearing upon humanity’s larger moral vocation as a species to serve as the unique juncture between freedom and nature in the workings of the cosmos; they empower a social hope in humanity’s effective participation together in the enactment of the highest good possible in the world. Kant’s comments on the French Revolution in the second part of the Conflict of the Faculties (CF 7:85–87) characterize it as an event of social hope: it evokes from its onlookers a recognition of “a moral character of humanity” from which it will be possible to enact moral progress eventuating in the deterrence of war.Footnote ⁶² This social characterization of hope also bears significantly upon the relationship between Kant’s political philosophy and his philosophy of religion as it is instanced in Kant’s depiction of Jesus as “son of God” (his preferred expression in Religion). Within the context of humanity’s “species vocation,” Kant takes the work of the “son of God” to be such that it opens the possibility for humans to act in a distinctively “godly” manner in their social interaction with one another. This godly manner consists of acting in ways that, by resisting and curtailing the radical evil of the divisiveness that leads to conflict, help to bring about the conditions for peace among peoples. Kant suggests this possibility by viewing Jesus as modeling for humanity a redemption from the grip of a radical evil that, by its corruption of individual moral agency by maxims of self-preference, has led to a pervasive state of social divisiveness, pointedly imaged by Hobbes as a constant state of war. On Kant’s account, this liberation from the bondage of evil, paradigmatically modeled for us in Jesus, thus not only serves to empower fully the moral freedom of individual human agents but also enables the freedom of humanity as a species to function effectively in concert toward the attainment of the peace that is an essential component of humanity’s participation in the establishment of the highest good possible in the world.

In consequence, Jesus’s most godly activity – and, by extension, the most godly activity he models for human beings – was to make it possible for human beings to have the moral freedom to establish and live together in a social order in which they together overcome the evil of the social divisiveness leading to war; they do so by manifesting full respect for one another’s freedom in the dynamics of an ethical commonwealth that enacts the effective overcoming of such divisiveness.Footnote ⁶³ On Kant’s account, the most socially significant way in which the Son of God exhibits this godly mode of action is by his establishment of “the Kingdom of God.” Kant explicitly characterizes this establishment in terms of an empowerment of human freedom that has social as well as individual effects:

It is also of significance that this passage, indicating this social dimension to Jesus’s exemplification of the godly activity of effecting human freedom from bondage to radical evil, is found near the conclusion of Part II of Religion, prior to Kant’s extensive treatment, in Part III, of the establishment of the ethical commonwealth. In this text from Part II, his arguments, while still primarily focused on the grip that radical evil has upon the dynamics of individual moral agency, are nonetheless strikingly cast in social and political images. His reconstruction of Christian teaching about how God effects human redemption in the person of the Son of God articulates it with an explicit political inflection: redemption is accomplished in the context of a conflict between radical evil and the good principle that Kant frames in terms of sovereignty: which of these has a rightful claim to moral dominion over human beings? It is a conflict, moreover, in which Kant describes the part that Jesus plays in terms of a revolutionary resistance that puts in peril the sovereignty of “the prince of this world” (Rel. 6:78–84).Footnote ⁶⁴ These political resonances reinforce the function of this passage as a prelude to Part III’s more explicit and extensive discussion of the social dimensions of radical evil and of the ethical commonwealth as the locus in which human moral agents are called upon to engage one another’s freedom in concert for the overcoming of radical evil not just in its individual form of self-preference but also in the divisiveness in which such self-preference takes conflictual social form.

A further association that Kant’s text suggests regarding the relation between politics and religion in the critical project is one that links together the key moral, political, and religious images and tropes he uses for the social empowerment of human freedom. The moral/religious trope of an ethical commonwealth, the political trope of a cosmopolitan world order, and the theological trope of the kingdom of God each serve as a marker of the active participation of human freedom that is requisite for the enactment of the highest good as the final end of reason. It is this last trope, moreover, with its inflection that is unmistakably both religious and political, that Kant sees as the center of the good news of liberation from subjection to the dominion of evil that Jesus proclaims. As Kant articulates this image, he construes the kingdom of God as an achievement that, even though it has been decisively inaugurated by Jesus, will require the participation of human agency, exercising its freedom, for its lasting establishment.Footnote ⁶⁵ Just as the engagement of human freedom is required for the enactment of the social dynamic of full mutuality in the ethical commonwealth and for the functioning of the structures for maintaining peace among nations in a cosmopolitan world order, the enactment of the kingdom of God also requires the active and sustained historical engagement of human freedom.Footnote ⁶⁶ Human freedom is required as the socially shaping dynamism for the mutual recognition and respect that overcome exclusivities and divisiveness in human social interaction, particularly those from which come the most violent and virulent forms of social conflict. Cosmopolitan hope for the efficacy of human participation in the establishment of an international order of peace among nations and the pure religious (moral) faith exhibited socially in the mutual recognition and respect constitutive of the ethical commonwealth converge upon what Kant proposes, in two significant texts, as the categorical imperative of peace:

Such convergence upon an imperative of and for peace suggests that each of these tropes points to yet another with scriptural roots: “the peaceable kingdom.”

All these tropes provide a horizon of hope that offers space for human agency to have a genuine moral efficacy that, by overcoming divisiveness, participates in forming the highest good in a social inflection that serves in establishing conditions for peace. The horizon of hope framed by these images enables attainment of peace to be construed in social terms that require efficacy in the overcoming of divisiveness. Against this horizon, hope is most fundamentally a social hope, made possible by the dynamic of full mutuality that each image expresses in distinctive, but related ways. It is this perspective of social hope that will then provide the most encompassing basis for articulating the complementary functions played by Kant’s political philosophy and his philosophy of religion in unfolding the anthropological trajectory of his critical project. That horizon, as noted at a number of points in this Element, is one that functions to enable the enactment of full mutual moral recognition as the constitutive dynamic of the all-embracing social contexts – world, commonwealth, and kingdom – that are figured in each of these images.

This perspective of social hope, moreover, takes one of the key bearings of its orientation in moral “counterpoint” to what is arguably the central point of Kant’s often reiterated account of human moral failure: the self-preferential obduracy – the preference for “the dear self” – that goes “down deep” in the individual moral agency of us all.Footnote ⁶⁷ Not only does such obduracy manifest itself as the radical evil disorienting human agency into a pattern of self-preference that neglects the mutuality of respect constitutive of the social character of human finite freedom. It is central in fueling the divisiveness and contention that arises from “unsociable sociability” and that makes the social form of radical evil, war, possible.Footnote ⁶⁸ On this basis, one could then argue that a core dynamic of the critical project arises from the recognition of the need for humanity to undertake, in full freedom, the intellectual and moral discipline, i.e., critique, that will enable us to counter such self-preferential obduracy in all its forms, individual and social – and most especially in its most virulent social manifestation, war.

In the context of this need to counter the self-preferential obduracy of our agency, the suggestion put forth here is that the horizon of hope provided by these images can be seen to function as a “grammar” for the social instantiation of the recognition of our fundamental human mutuality that stands athwart the dynamics of self-preference: this horizon provides the structure for a syntax of moral recognition that places a constraint upon both the explicit and implicit claims of self-preference that deflect, preclude, and undermine the effective acknowledgment of our human mutuality and its moral weight for both the individual and social exercise of our freedom.Footnote ⁶⁹ Such a syntax of moral recognition is embedded in Kant’s moral philosophy as a deep grammar for the appropriate exercise of human freedom. It can be found, for instance, in the formulations of the categorical imperative – e.g., universal law, of humanity as an end in itself – that place a veto of mutuality upon the self-preferential obduracy that urges upon individual moral agents a self-exemption from the universal requirements of moral reason.Footnote ⁷⁰ It is also operative in the discourse of mutual respect appropriate to membership and shared responsibility in what Kant terms a kingdom of ends; such discourse helps to post reminders against the exemptions from mutuality that we are otherwise tempted make for ourselves. The tug of the dear self is also at work in the social dynamic that Kant terms unsociable sociability, which, even though it has power to draw us together, far more often conspires with our self-preferential obduracy to drive us asunder into hostile camps of “us” and “them.”Footnote ⁷¹ Moral obduracy, working in concert with unsociable sociability, provides space not only for conflict among individuals’ self-preferences but also for various social alliances to cloak their dynamics of fracture, factionalism, and power as simulacra of legitimate common interests.

In view of the limitations that moral obduracy and unsociable sociability can place upon the moral hope enabled by an individual agent’s exercise of moral freedom, the enlarged social horizon of hope that a cosmopolitan world order and the ethical commonwealth bring to human efforts to attain the highest good take on great importance. Our individual exercise of practical reason does provide us with a moral faith, enabling hope for our steadfastness in ordering our maxims in accord with the full scope of reason’s moral demand, yet it does not license a moral presumptuousness that one will, in fact, always heed that demand.Footnote ⁷² Neither does it thereby unproblematically permit immediate extension of that hope to the agency of others. Such hope seems confined to a perspective upon one’s individual moral constancy that does not explicitly attend to the mutuality that shapes our moral agency, or to the individual and social obstacles we help to place in its path. Over against an awareness of the moral obduracy captured in the image of the “crooked wood” of our humanity, such individually focused hope is hard won and often fragile.Footnote ⁷³ To the extent that one frames and adopts such maxims according to the universal scope of reason’s moral demand, one may hope to stand resolutely against one’s own self-preferential obduracy: awareness that “I can” gives hope that “I will” – yet even that does not guarantee actual performance in all instances; nor does it seem sufficient to overcome by itself the social forms of the obduracy of self-preference that foster divisiveness and fuel social conflict.

In consequence, such an individually focused horizon of hope seems hardly strong enough to provide a basis for a robust social extension of that hope to others: we are all equally prone to such self-preferential warping into crooked wood; that proclivity, moreover, may be intensified all the more as our obduracy of self-preference seeks out alliance with others under the dynamics of unsociable sociability.Footnote ⁷⁴ In the context of our unsociable sociability, hope has an even more urgent need to extend its scope beyond what moral agents may hope for themselves individually as the outcome of their right conduct. It needs to orient us more fully upon those coordinates that enable our recognition of the depth of the mutuality in which our conduct and its outcome are embedded. That recognition is one that, on Kant’s account, emerges from the capacity of self-governing moral agents to acknowledge and engage one another in mutuality, as equal participants in the modalities of social hope envisioned in each of these images: in the ordering of mutuality as a “kingdom of ends” that is constitutive of an ethical commonwealth; in the construction of the practices and institutions for the establishment of cosmopolitan order of international peace; in extending the moral reach of the kingdom of God; or, as Kant’s idiom from earlier texts would express it, as co-legislators for a kingdom of ends.

This larger social context is the one envisioned in Kant’s three images of an ethical commonwealth, a cosmopolitan world order of peace, and the kingdom of God. They provide bases for a syntax of moral recognition that functions to clear a social space within which agents address not only questions of individual human interaction but also those pertaining to the larger sphere of the social governance of human life.Footnote ⁷⁵ On Kant’s account, a grammar of social hope functions on a scale even larger than the important one of breaking the grip of self-preferential obduracy with respect to the moral life of individual moral agents. It also extends into workings of the dynamics by which reason empowers human agents to govern their social, political, and cultural interaction with one another in accord with an inclusive mutuality that breaks the social grip of the self-preferential obduracy at work in unsocial sociability. Hope in this latter context is thus concerned not so much with what one’s own moral power may bring about in the face of the internal tug from one’s own self-regarding maxims, but with what may be effected in concert with the moral power of others in the face of the power of unsociable sociability to reinforce the self-preferential obduracy that would drive us apart into factions and set the dynamics of conflict in motion.

In this instance, the question of hope bears not just upon the moral destiny of the individual as it might be figured religiously, for instance in Christianity as well as other religions, as a form of “everlasting life.” In the context of the social character embedded in the tropes that Kant employs to articulate the shape of the good to be enacted in humanity’s moral vocation, the question of hope also bears upon larger and more challenging outcomes for humanity as a whole and for the cosmos of which humanity is a part. One of these outcomes is envisioned as the project of establishing the conditions for an international order of peace, for which the establishment of an order of “cosmopolitan hospitality” provides an important marker;Footnote ⁷⁶ another, similarly large in scope, and of increasing urgency in the face of the scale and scope of environmental degradation in this age, is a restructuring of the engagement of human freedom with nature in the biosphere to turn it away from a destructive dynamic of consumption toward one that manifests the respect appropriate to humanity’s vocation to be the juncture of nature and freedom.Footnote ⁷⁷

These outcomes are ones that, on Kant’s account of humanity’s moral vocation, need to be envisioned as ensuing in history and society in consequence of human enactment – or failure of enactment – of the social accountability we owe one another in virtue of our fundamental mutuality as members of an ethical commonwealth and a cosmopolitan world order. They are functions of the attainment of the good that constitutes a common and shared destiny for all humanity and indeed for the entire cosmos. In view of the inclusive social scope of these outcomes, hope requires us to consider the extent to which the exercise of our moral reason also requires us to enact for one another practices and conditions enabling us to place confidence in the proper exercise of one another’s moral autonomy in respectful mutuality even as we stand aware of the moral opacity that allows us to conceal our own self-preferential moral obduracy not only from ourselves individually but also from one another.Footnote ⁷⁸

This suggests what may, in the end, be of the most fundamental import for the role that Kant sees for religion with respect to the attainment of the highest good possible in the world; it bears upon our capacity for seeing that good as a social good for which we have the capacity for effecting in concert with one another. Kant, unsurprisingly, considers the efficacy of human freedom as a participant in attaining good as requisite for it to be an authentically human moral good. The social horizon that the ethical commonwealth – along with the other tropes – provides upon the efficacy of the human enactment of good makes it also requisite that such enactment be fully attentive to the nexus of relationality out of which it comes and on which it acts. In other words, we must be attentive, as we envision ourselves as participants in the social dynamics of the mutuality proposed to us in each of these tropes, to the thoroughly social character of what we seek to enact and of its interrelatedness to the social manner of its enactment.

A central mark of this social good is its power to overcome dynamics of human divisiveness that arise from the moral obduracy of both individual and social forms of self-preference. On Kant’s account, critically disciplined religion orients itself toward the universal horizon that reason provides for engaging the freedom of human moral agents in the dynamics of the mutual recognition and respect that overcome self-preference. This horizon enables the establishment, in full social form, of the dynamics of human recognition and respect that Kant terms the ethical commonwealth. This horizon, moreover, also encompasses the construction of a cosmopolitan order for the attainment of international peace. Kant envisions this order as a necessary external mark of the full social form of the inclusive mutual recognition and respect that, in the ethical commonwealth, is instantiated as the constant inner orientation of the moral freedom of human agency to full and inclusive mutual recognition.

Kant thus envisions both critically disciplined religion in the form of an ethical commonwealth and a cosmopolitan world order as each empowering the exercise of human freedom to enact social dynamics that overcome division and conflict and to create conditions for a “peaceable kingdom.” They do so by their complementary orientation to a horizon of mutual recognition and respect. This orientation is enacted in and by the ethical commonwealth, which offers a concrete instantiation of the practice of authentic religion by being the lived and living social expression of the dynamics of inclusive mutual respect. As such an instantiation, it provides a model of full human mutuality, inviting all to orient their lives to the horizon of inclusivity and universality expressed in the trope of the kingdom of God, as well as in the moral/political trope of a cosmopolitan world order. This model, in accord with Jesus’s mode of living, is formed in social dynamics of inclusive mutual respect; it makes possible the overcoming of exclusivities and divisiveness in human social interaction, particularly those exclusivities from which the most violent and virulent form of social conflict, war, emerges. In this role, religion as a locus empowering the social exercise of human freedom to enact possibilities for overcoming division and conflict stands in religious complementary to the political empowerment that a cosmopolitan perspective provides for the conditions and social structures that foster the attainment of perpetual peace.