Merold Westphal: The emergence of modern philosophy of religion

Merold Westphal: The emergence of modern philosophy of religion

Esmond Lee unpacks the most challenging of the three Implications philosophy articles

Esmond Lee

Edexcel A2 Unit 4: Implications — Philosophy of religion

Westphal’s purpose is to show how the state of modern philosophy has emerged and what the new issues might be. Scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages was confident that it was possible to talk meaningfully of the nature of God, his existence and man’s relationship to him. Aquinas, for example, employs both reason and faith to arrive at God’s existence — faith in as much as an initial premise is required that there might be a God, reason to establish logically the possibility. Thus, we might ask whether there is an Infinite Being (just as in algebraic calculation we might say ‘let x = 6’) and then proceed as to whether the finite or contingent nature of the world bespeaks this possibility.

Deists

But by the eighteenth century confidence in this procedure is waning. Deist thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau were happy to use rationality alone to speculate about the nature of ultimate goodness (for which they were happy to use the word ‘God’) but rejected any idea of special revelation, for reason told them that logic is a universal tool and the notion that truth can be specially revealed seems, therefore, quite irrational. Notice that all too often these deists of the French tradition are claimed as atheists. This is not strictly true for their argument is not against the concept of God (as understood by them) but against the apparatus of the Church’s claim to special revelation through what they regarded (in Westphal’s phraseology) as the husk rather than the kernel.

Moreover, since those who claim special revelation over and against the views of others are necessarily claiming exclusivity, then such a form of belief in God is divisive. The Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century that devastated the German states is commonly cited as clear evidence of the undesirability of theological supremacism — and indeed, forms a basis for modern political atheism.

Political interest

Hence, their enthusiasm for this project is as much political as it is philosophical, seeking to unseat the special influence and comfortable privileges enjoyed by the ecclesia for their part in maintaining the monarchy and the aristocracy at the expense of what Marx would later call the proletariat. It is not always observed that the notion of arguing for truth, claimed by many a philosopher, may sometimes be a device to subvert existing norms for the sake of another.

Perhaps this is not to be wondered at for, if all existential statements are, as Kant said, synthetic, then all statements about the nature of reality are open to challenge. In Marxist thought this warrants the rejection of all philosophising for being attempts by the intelligentsia, in the service of the ruling class, to subject the working class to a dominatory concept of ‘reality’, when, in all fairness, the only base fact is simply the material world. Later, as the nineteenth century merged into the twentieth century, this would give way to the notion of postmodernism with its claim that there are no fixed truth-positions, only ‘narratives’ — that is, interpretations of existence or ‘worldviews’ which are the especial preferences or heritage of individuals, whether within or in separation from their culture.

Feuerbach

Where the French deist initiative attacked the political role of the Church, the response of thinkers such as Ludwig Feuerbach in Germany was of a different stamp. Feuerbach made it his business to show that the very concept of God was illusory, the product of wishful thinking and a projection of human desires for, if there be no God nor heaven besides, what could account for the belief in God except the frustrations of those bereft of a sense of worth or place in this world, whose only hope lies in the fantastical expectation of a benefit in the next life.

This seems persuasive, but as Alister McGrath (2005) has argued it involves a supposition of the non-existence of God in order to generate an explanation of religious belief of a mundane order; the conclusion is the product therefore of special pleading. Yet Feuerbach had his influence and his thesis provides a platform for other atheist reductions of belief in God, not least from Marx, Durkheim and Freud.

Kant

Emmanuel Kant, however, had taken a different course. His defence of religious thought is deistic and argues that logic alone can yield an understanding of what God (or goodness) in principle might be like, though he proposed that we could not know God directly, for he reasoned that the human mind can only know what its interpretation of reality was, not reality itself, for the mind is constrained by the partiality of the limits of its perceptions.

Yet from that Kant held that in pure logical abstract, goodness could be reckoned to be goodness only if it were Good. The right action is therefore that which if it were universalised would be impartial. From this is derived the Categorical Imperative, namely to let the maxim (principle which guides our decision) of our action be that if it is right, it is right universally and therefore would be pure from bias and capable, in abstract, of benefitting all. This theorem is a priori synthetic, a peculiar standing which is explained by being a priori in principle and synthetic in operation.

A loophole

Kant essentially is trying to find a philosophy to guide man that has universal appeal through rationality and he must therefore strip his system of any theological revelation. Yet his thinking left a loophole (Vardy and Grosch 1996), for what if our reason is defective to the extent that we are unable to notice, rather as a choir unaccompanied may sing a refrain progressively out of tune and be unaware of it?

To this Kant has no answer, save that of confessing that tacitly there would have to be some external source that might correct. Some scholars have inferred that this is not unlike Kant’s observation that since in this life the virtuous suffer and the wicked prosper, morality would make no sense unless there were an afterlife in which due reward could be meted out, thus maintaining the distinction in the consequences of our actions. This he stipulates requires a superintending principle of good, namely God. It is sometimes held that this constitutes Kant’s Moral Argument for the existence of God but strictly speaking this is a mistake (Vardy and Grosch 1996), for Kant’s reservation that we cannot know reality itself demands that all we can establish is that God is ‘the postulate of the moral life’.

KANT HELD THAT IN PURE LOGICAL ABSTRACT, GOODNESS COULD BE RECKONED TO BE GOODNESS ONLY IF IT WERE GOOD.

THE HUMAN SOUL SHOULD NEVER BE IMPRISONED BY A COLD LOGIC THAT EXPLOITS THE INDIVIDUAL AS A MERE COMPONENT

A dividing point

Kant’s philosophy marks a dividing point in Western thought:

■ On the one hand there stands the materialist tradition, exemplified by Marx, which maintains that all metaphysics is nonsensical, if not deceptive.

■ In contrast there stands Kierkegaard who rejects objective truth as an impossibility, given that the calculations of what is being observed are governed by subjective bias.

For Kierkegaard, therefore, the objective study of reality and in particular the materialist explanations of what it is to be human are confections, not truths. If the very stuff of what we are is not governed by materialist claims to objectivity and the hard determinism that it leads to, then by contrast, surely, choice and freewill are the key features to understanding what it is to be human. Kierkegaard’s thought therefore maximises the notion of choice and, given that objectivism is not the path to understanding, so too empirical reasoning is as irrelevant to the question of God as it is to the understanding of the human.

Altruistic love

For Kierkegaard, any claim to prove God involves reducing him to an object and, worse, a claim to have acquired a proof which demands acceptance, submission to an intellectual system of authority and an ethic of control. Indeed, by the same token the same could be said of atheist materialism. In this diseased project acceptance of the ‘sinner’ is conditional upon compliance.

By contrast, Kierkegaard invites a rejection of all attempts at enforcing belief through proof. For him, God is discovered through an utterly free choice to be unconditionally loving, even though there is no rational nor empirical justification. Thus, belief is a commitment to altruistic love which yearns to participate in the divine perfection by a life of salvific action towards the ‘other’ — that is, towards those who are in need of being loved so they too may be loving.

In this way, Kierkegaard sees the Christian life not as endorsing some social programme of moral control defined by the needs of the cultural establishment — in his day, the emergent capitalist industrialism of nineteenthcentury Denmark. The human soul should never be imprisoned by a cold logic that exploits the individual as a mere component, to be acknowledged only in as much as it is useful, as it fits in.

This is an utter horror. Instead, the Christian is enraptured by a vision of transcendent love — the divine — which challenges the social construct at every step. This love brooks no hesitation, nor does it promise to be comfortable, for the denying of the self-servingly judgemental ego (Kierkegaard’s figure ‘the Judge’) is painful; the willingness to forgive involves an abandonment of self-righteousness and takes on board a loving duty to see the world through the eyes of the other party. Kierkegaard observes: ‘A Christian must live in such a state of anguish that if he were a pagan, he would not hesitate to kill himself.’ Such parabolic cries are typical of his keen spiritual sensitivities.

Kierkegaard would have been contemptuous of Durkheim’s supposition that the function of religion is to conform individuals to the establishment. But he feared that the way in which theology and philosophy had developed had left Christianity in this last and desperate resort, shorn of any belief in a truly real God, pining after a golden age and dependent now on an idolatrous subjection to the state and its diminution of the humanity of the individual soul. He writes:

‘Christianity, which in the Divine Love, wants all men to be individuals, has been transformed by human bungling into precisely the opposite …in every way it has come to this, that what we now call the Church is what Christ came to abolish. Our whole way of life is stuff and nonsense.’

Hegel and Schleiermacher

Public enemy number one, to Kierkegaard’s mind, was his contemporary Georg Hegel. Hegel was attempting to cut a middle path between two dangers that he perceived — rationalist deism and romanticism. Romanticism was a reaction to pure rationalism, which, employing a logic of equal rights (based on the notion that if humans are all animals, then they are the same; if they are the same they have equal needs; if they have equal needs then they have equal rights), contains an implicit egoism — held only in check by law or some expression of it such as Rousseau’s Social Contract.

The horrors of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars proved testimony to the limitations of a society based on reason’s suppression of the emotions. In Germany Schleiermacher had therefore rejected the inadequacies of Kantian rationalism.

Schleiermacher had hoped that an appeal to a sense of universal goodness, to be found in all religions, would be a motivational enthusiasm. He was happy to accept the liturgies and dogmas of specific faiths — for example, the Sacraments and the doctrine of the Incarnation — but only in so much as they were illustrative of the general principle of religion and evoked compassion (just as the springs and ping-pong balls of a chemistry model of an atom are visualisations but not significant in themselves).

For Schleiermacher, God is not a separate entity to be argued over but an experience that can be found in reaction to his presence in the universe, being found in all things. For this reason, no one religion has supremacy, for the inner mediated experience of God in the world is all that matters — and is accessible to all equally, never mind what religious tradition people may stand in.

However, this approach does not satisfy Hegel. He had already rejected Kant for thinking that religion is simply reducible to morality but he was not satisfied that religion is just a feeling without any identifiable content. Without such reference points, people might believe in anything they fancied.

Hegel therefore proposed that instead we read the Christian belief in the Incarnation as an expression of the claim not that Jesus was uniquely divine but that as a human, he points to the divinity that exists in the human spirit of everyone.

Hume, Marx and Nietzsche

More radical than the deists, romantics and Hegel, though, were three thinkers — Hume, Marx and Nietzsche — who are not content simply to differentiate the husk from the kernel, but instead rejected the entire kernel of discussion. Each in their way is sceptical about the real reason for religious sentiment:

■ Hume sees religion not as loving a God but as seeking advantage — for example, material blessing by adoring the God of nature; selfinterest, not divine compassion.

■ Marx sees belief as an escapist fantasy encouraged by the exploitative.

■ Nietzsche’s view is that religion is a snare which traps you in the illusory thought patterns of the past.

Westphal’s final analysis

Westphal’s chief concern is to show that the thinking of the key philosophers of the Enlightenment failed to deal appropriately with the limitations of medieval scholasticism in order to point up the essential question of where the balance of the debate should turn now and in what terms it should be conducted.

In the final analysis, he feels that there is a core difference between describing religion as essentially a human social activity — and nothing more — or instead to notice it as referring to a transcendent reality in which the conventional, social and moral order is constantly held up to scrutiny by a sense of the other.

Esmond Lee teaches at Trinity School, Croyden.