Kant's Moral Faith

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In this work, an attempt is made to analyse Kant's concept of moral faith. Kant famously declares that human reason must deny knowledge to make room for faith. Although theoretical reasoń cannot offer cognition of God or proof of God's existence, practical consideration can justify a belief, at least for moral action, that there is a Wise, Benevolent, and Just Providence ordering the world. Morality requires us to set an end that theoretical reason gives us insufficient grounds to believe is attainable. We are thus threatened with an incoherence between our practical volition and our justified beliefs and assertions about the world. The only reasonable way to resolve this practical problem regarding the possibility of the highest good is to go beyond what theoretical reason can affirm about this idea and postulate to the existence of its object.

ARUP JYOTI SARMA is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Tripura University, Tripura, India. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in 2010. His areas of interest include Ethics, Western Philosophy, Gadamer, and Tagorean Studies. His book 'Kant and Hegel on Is-Ought Dichotomy' was published in 2014 by Progressive Publishers, Kolkata. He has published articles in national and international peer-reviewed journals. This work is a slightly modified version of a minor research project, awarded by the Indian Council of Philosophical Research, New Delhi, during 2015-16.

Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724-12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential and controversial figures in modern Western philosophy. Kant is best known for his work on the philosophy of ethics and metaphysics, but he has made significant contributions to other disciplines. Some of his important works are Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics: That Will be Able to Come Forward as Science.

Nearly his entire life as a student, teacher, and writer was spent within the boundaries of his native city. At the Collegium Fredericianum, where he prepared for the university (1732-1740), he was chiefly interested in the Roman classics; at the University of Königsberg, he studied physics, mathematics, philosophy and theology (1740-1746). From 1746 to 1755 he served as a tutor in several families residing in the neighbourhood of Königsberg; in 1755 he received an appointment as a special lecturer at the university and lectured on mathematics, physics, logic, metaphysics, ethics, physical geography, anthropology, natural theology, and "philosophical encyclopaedia". From 1766 to 1772, he combined with his position the post of assistant librarian of the Royal Library. In 1770, Kant became a professor of logic and metaphysics, a position which he held untill 1797 when his frail health condition made it necessary for him to retire. He died in 1804.

In this work, I have discussed Kant's doctrine of moral faith. According to Kant, morality is fundamentally independent of religious belief, leads to religion and his argument is that morality requires we must hope that the moral and the natural orders can be fully coordinated in such a way in which happiness and virtue, our natural and our moral ends, are perfectly harmonized in each of us to give us the highest good (summum bonum), and our need to conceive this pursuit in relation to the will of God. The highest good requires, namely, a correspondence of happiness to worthiness to be happy, and Kant famously maintains that we can conceive of such a correspondence only by supposing that the world is governed by a Being that is omniscient (so as to know our worthiness to be happy), omnipotent (so as to be able to grant happiness in proportion to worthiness) and perfectly good (so that it wills, both justly and benevolently, that beings who have made themselves worthy of happiness should partake in it). Therefore, the postulation of such a Being is the guarantor of our highest pursuit and we also hope that the gulf between the theoretical and the practical uses of reason will be overcome. In this way, Kant thinks the concept of the highest good as the object and final end of pure practical reason, the moral law leads to religion.