What may I hope?
The third of Kant's four questions sounds like wishes for the future. What it means is more precise: what may I hope if I do what I ought to do?
In his Logic Kant reduces the whole field of philosophy to four questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? What is the human being? Then he assigns them to four disciplines.
The first question is answered by metaphysics, the second by morals, the third by religion and the fourth by anthropology.
Kant, Logic (1800), Ak. 9:25, own translation
Hope therefore belongs to religion. What is meant, however, is not the teaching of a church but the question of what a reasonable person may hope without claiming more than he can know. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant puts the question more precisely: “if I now do what I ought to do, what may I then hope?” And he adds at once: “For all hoping is directed at happiness” (CPR B 833, Ak. 3:523, own translation). The question joins two things that often fall apart in life: acting well and being happy.
Sources: Kant, Logic, Ak. 9:25 (korpora.org, German original) · Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 805/B 833, Ak. 3:523 (korpora.org)
The highest good: worthy and happy
Kant's answer begins with an observation everyone knows: whoever acts decently is not rewarded for it as a matter of course.
In the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) Kant distinguishes two meanings of “highest good”. The supreme good is virtue, “the worthiness to be happy”; it is the condition of everything else. The complete good demands more: virtue and happiness together, with happiness distributed “exactly in proportion to morality”.
For to be in need of happiness, and also worthy of it, and yet not to partake of it, cannot coexist at all with the perfect volition of a rational being who at the same time had all power, if we even only think of such a being as an experiment.
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Ak. 5:110, own translation
That sounds as if one should act well in order to be rewarded. That is exactly not what Kant means. The motive must remain duty; fear or hope as an incentive would destroy “the entire moral worth of actions” (Ak. 5:129). That is why morality, for him, is “not really the doctrine of how we are to make ourselves happy, but of how we are to become worthy of happiness” (Ak. 5:130). Hope comes only afterwards, as the question of whether a world is thinkable in which the worthy do not go away empty-handed. Quotations in own translation.
Does doing good pay off?
In the world as we know it, the two often do not match. For Kant, the moral law contains “not the slightest ground” for a necessary connection between morality and happiness (Ak. 5:124, own translation).
Is it reasonable to hope that doing good pays off in the end?
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Kant separates two things. One should act well because it is one's duty, not for a reward: morality is “not really the doctrine of how we are to make ourselves happy, but of how we are to become worthy of happiness” (Ak. 5:130). Yet being worthy and going away empty-handed “cannot coexist at all with the perfect volition of a rational being” (Ak. 5:110). That is why one may hope. For Kant this hope leads to God and immortality, as postulates, not as knowledge. Own translation.
Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
Heinrich Heine mocked in 1834 that Kant had killed the philosophers' belief in God with theoretical reason and revived it with practical reason out of pity for his servant: “Old Lampe must have a God, otherwise the poor man cannot be happy …” Heine puts these words in Kant's mouth as satire; Kant never said them. Own translation.
Heine, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1834), Book Three
Comprehension question: why, according to Kant, should one act well?
Sources: Kant, CPrR, Ak. 5:110 (korpora.org) · Ak. 5:129 · Ak. 5:130 · Wikipedia: Summum bonum · Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland, Book Three (Projekt Gutenberg, German)
Freedom, immortality, God: the three postulates
From the moral law and the hope for the highest good Kant derives three assumptions that cannot be proved and yet cannot be shaken off.
A postulate, for Kant, is a special kind of proposition: “a theoretical proposition, which as such cannot be proved”, but which is “inseparably attached to a practical law that holds unconditionally a priori” (Ak. 5:122, own translation). Whoever takes the moral law seriously must therefore assume something he cannot prove. Kant names three such assumptions (Ak. 5:132).
- 1Freedom
Whoever places himself under the moral law must think of himself as independent of the world of the senses: as able to determine his will by a law of reason rather than by his drives (Ak. 5:132).
- 2Immortality
The highest good requires that the will be in complete accord with the moral law. Kant calls this “holiness”, and no human being is capable of it “at any moment of his existence”. All that is possible is progress “to infinity”, and that presupposes an existence that does not end: the immortality of the soul (Ak. 5:122, own translation).
- 3God
Whoever acts is not at the same time the cause of nature; he cannot ensure that happiness and morality come together. The highest good is therefore possible only if there is a supreme cause of nature “that has a causality in keeping with the moral disposition”: God (Ak. 5:124 f., own translation).
For the curious: denying knowledge to make room for faith
In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787) Kant summed up his procedure in one sentence: “I therefore had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (B XXX, Ak. 3:19, own translation). This is no renunciation of reason. Because reason can prove nothing about God, freedom and immortality, it cannot prove the opposite either. The rational faith of the postulates has its place in that gap.
Sources: Kant, CPrR, Ak. 5:122 (postulate, immortality; German original) · Ak. 5:124 f. (God) · Ak. 5:132 (postulates in general) · CPR B XXX, Ak. 3:19 · Wikipedia: Critique of Practical Reason
Hope in history
Kant does not hope only for the individual, nor only for a life beyond. He also asks whether humankind as a whole makes progress.
In November 1784, a month before the essay on enlightenment, the Berlinische Monatsschrift published Kant's “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose”. The starting point is sober. Whoever looks at human doings on the “great world stage”, Kant says, finds in the end everything “woven together out of folly, childish vanity, often also out of childish malice and destructiveness” (Ak. 8:17 f.). And yet history “allows us to hope” that it might discover a “regular course” on the large scale, just as the annual tables of marriages, births and deaths show regularities although every individual decides freely (Ak. 8:17).
The engine of this course is, of all things, conflict. Kant calls it “unsocial sociability”: human beings want to live together and at the same time want to arrange everything according to their own mind (Ak. 8:20 f.). Ambition, lust for power and greed drive them out of idleness, and so talents develop that would have slumbered for ever in a peaceful “Arcadian shepherd's life”. “Man wants concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species: she wants discord” (Ak. 8:21). The goal is a society in which right holds for everyone, and in the end a state of right between states as well. It will not be easy:
Out of wood as crooked as that from which man is made, nothing entirely straight can be fashioned.
Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784), Ak. 8:23, own translation
So all that remains is “the approximation to this idea” (Ak. 8:23). Kant does not want his guiding thread to replace the writing of history; that, he writes, would be a “misinterpretation” of his intention. He offers a point of view that opens “a consoling prospect into the future” (Ak. 8:30). That is no proof that things will turn out so. It is a reason to hope that they will. Quotations in own translation.
Sources: Kant, Idea …, Ak. 8:17 f. (korpora.org, German original) · Ak. 8:20 f. (unsocial sociability) · Ak. 8:23 (crooked wood) · Ak. 8:30 · Wikipedia: Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose · German Wikipedia (publication November 1784)
The guarantee of perpetual peace
Eleven years later Kant extends this hope to peace between states.
In the first supplement to “Perpetual Peace” (1795) Kant asks who vouches that peace will not remain a daydream. His answer: “nothing less than the great artist nature”, whose mechanical course shows how “concord arises out of the discord of human beings, even against their will” (Ak. 8:360). Nature separates peoples by the “difference of languages and of religions” (Ak. 8:367) and unites them through self-interest: it is “the spirit of commerce, which cannot coexist with war” (Ak. 8:368). Even the problem of setting up a state can be solved “even for a nation of devils (if only they have understanding)” (Ak. 8:366). Quotations in own translation.
What matters is how cautiously Kant puts this. Nature guarantees peace, he writes, “admittedly with a certainty that is not sufficient to predict its future (theoretically), but that is enough for practical purposes and makes it a duty to work towards this (not merely chimerical) end” (Ak. 8:368). That is exactly how Kant's hope is built: not knowledge of the future, but a reason to work on it. How the peace essay is structured, and what a treaty following its articles would look like, is shown in the chapter Peace & Politics.
Sources: Kant, Perpetual Peace, Ak. 8:360 (guarantee; German original) · Ak. 8:366 (nation of devils) · Ak. 8:367 · Ak. 8:368 (spirit of commerce, “for practical purposes”) · Wikipedia: Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch
Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason
In 1793 Kant draws the consequence of morality for religion, and runs into trouble with the censors.
The title is a programme: Kant asks what religion means when it is considered by reason alone. The preface to the first edition already states where the path leads.
Morality thus leads inevitably to religion, through which it extends itself to the idea of a powerful moral lawgiver outside the human being, in whose will that is the final end (of the creation of the world) which at the same time can and ought to be the final end of the human being.
Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1793), Ak. 6:6, own translation
The order matters: morality is not founded on religion, it leads to it. The book reads Christian doctrines as images of ideas of reason. Original sin becomes the question of “radical evil”, a propensity to evil that every human being carries within. The figure of Christ becomes the symbol of a morally perfect human being, the church the image of an “ethical community” in which people work together for the good. Kant's goal is the gradual transition from an ecclesiastical faith that rests on revelation to a pure religious faith of reason.
For the Prussian censors this went too far. In 1792 the Berlin censor refused to allow the second part to be printed in the Berlinische Monatsschrift; Kant had the whole work approved through the philosophy faculty at Jena, and in 1793 it appeared as a book. On 1 October 1794 a royal rescript accused him of misusing his philosophy to degrade fundamental doctrines of Christianity. Kant declared, “as Your Royal Majesty's most loyal subject”, that he would refrain entirely “from all public lectures concerning religion”. He had chosen this wording, as he later wrote, “cautiously”: it bound him only as long as this king lived (Ak. 7:10, own translation). How it came to this is told in the chapter Life.
Sources: Kant, Religion, Ak. 6:6 (korpora.org, German original) · Wikipedia: Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason · German Wikipedia: Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (contents) · Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, Ak. 7:6 (rescript of 1794) · Ak. 7:10 (Kant's declaration)
The End of All Things
A year after the book on religion Kant asks what people expect of the end of the world, and why.
The short essay appeared in June 1794 in the Berlinische Monatsschrift. Kant takes a pious turn of phrase literally, that a dying person goes “from time into eternity” (Ak. 8:327), and asks what that could mean. He distinguishes a natural end of all things that accords with moral ends, a mystical one of which we understand nothing, and an unnatural one that we bring about ourselves by misunderstanding the final end. The point is aimed at every kind of compulsion in matters of faith: a Christianity that was no longer lovable and was enforced by authority would bring about the perverse end. More on the work page The End of All Things.
Sources: Kant, The End of All Things, Ak. 8:327 (korpora.org, German original) · German Wikipedia: Das Ende aller Dinge
Hope or a back door?
Kant's answer to the third question has provoked mockery and objection from the start.
The best-known mockery is Heinrich Heine's of 1834. In his account Kant “stormed heaven” with the Critique of Pure Reason and smashed the old proofs of God. Then he sees his servant, old Lampe, weeping, takes pity and lets practical reason vouch for the existence of God once more. Heine puts invented words into Kant's mouth:
Old Lampe must have a God, otherwise the poor man cannot be happy – but man ought to be happy in the world – so says practical reason – very well – then let practical reason vouch for the existence of God.
Heinrich Heine, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1834), Book Three, own translation: satire, not something Kant said
This is satire: Kant never said these words, and in his work God is the condition not of a servant's happiness but of the possibility of the highest good. The objection behind it is meant seriously, though, and can be put without mockery: do the postulates bring in through the back door what Kant had turned away at the front as unprovable? Kant's own answer is in the Critique of Practical Reason. The postulates do “not extend speculative knowledge”; they only show what someone must assume who is to promote the highest good (Ak. 5:132, own translation). Whether that answer is enough is still an open question, and the answer to it is yours.
Sources: Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland, Book Three (Projekt Gutenberg, German) · German Wikipedia: Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (1834) · Kant, CPrR, Ak. 5:132
NoteCrooked timber
… out of such crooked timber as the human being is made of, nothing entirely straight can be fashioned.
Reference: Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (1784), Ak. 8:23 · Read the original
Kant is speaking of humanity's hardest task: a head of state who is just in himself and yet remains a human being. It can never be fully solved, only approached. Hope here means progress without completion.
Translation: Our own translation of the German original.
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