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Chapter 11 - Religion and the Highest Good: Speaking to the Heart of Even the Best of Us

from Part III - Freedom as Autonomous Willing: Kant’s Sensible Agent

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2018

Kate A. Moran
Affiliation:
Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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Summary

Barbara Herman examines Kant’s discussion of religion and the highest good in Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. In other texts, Kant’s arguments regarding the highest good revolve around a pair of concerns: that human beings can never will well enough to deserve happiness, and that desire for the highest good is not consistent with good willing. But in the Religion, Herman argues, Kant’s main concern is with the corrosive moral anxiety that arises in even the best of us faced with a propensity to evil whose source is the heart, not the will. Kant argues that this anxiety can be resolved by adopting the narrative of overcoming in Christian theology, using the son of God as a prototype or typic for a reformation of moral sensibility. Kant sees an ongoing threat to human goodness arising from the ways we pursue separate purposes; the solution is a union around a common principle: an ethical community, understood as a kind of church. Herman thus finds in Kant an argument that human nature might require something contingent, namely religion of a certain sort, if the highest good, and so the freedom of which we are capable in this life, is to be realized.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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