Third question · Religion

What may I hope?

Kant states the third question more fully: “if I do what I ought to, what may I then hope?”

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For Kant this question is “practical and theoretical at the same time”, and he adds: “all hope is directed at happiness”. In his Logic, and already in a letter to Carl Friedrich Stäudlin of 1793, he assigns it to religion. Whoever acts morally makes himself worthy of happiness, but nobody guarantees that he will also obtain it. The union of virtue and happiness, the highest good, remains an ideal of reason.

So that this goal is not an empty promise, practical reason must, according to Kant, assume God and the immortality of the soul (alongside freedom, without which there would be no ought), as postulates, not as proven knowledge (Critique of Practical Reason, 1788). For him hope also looks to history: we may think of a plan of nature that ends in a just constitution and peace between states. In 1794 his book on religion (1793) earned him a royal reprimand (a cabinet order), after which Kant promised not to write publicly on religion again.

In this division Kant's essay on enlightenment stands under “What ought I to do?”; but it belongs here as well, because in it Kant counts on the slow progress of a whole public.

Sources: Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Ak. 3:523 (our translation) · Logic, Ak. 9:25 — Kant corpus (German) · Letter to Carl Friedrich Stäudlin, 4 May 1793, Ak. 11:429 (German) · Wikipedia: Summum bonum (Kant) · Wikipedia: Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (royal censorship) · What Is Enlightenment?, Ak. 8:36 (“only slowly”) — Kant corpus (German) · Wikipedia: What Is Enlightenment?

Which chapters and devices stand behind which door is a division for learning, not Kant's own: many of his ideas belong to several questions.