Becoming Divine: Kant's Autonomous Self
Professor Christopher Insole (Durham University)

April 19, 2017, 9:00am - 10:30am
Institute of Religion and Critical Inquiry, Australian Catholic University

Room 4.28, Level 4
250 Victoria Parade
Melbourne 3002
Australia

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This lecture is the second of two lectures. Across the lectures, the case is made that Immanuel Kant is neither a secular atheist, nor a traditional Christian. Nor is Kant best understood as a heterodox Christian, trying to bend the tradition to his purposes, but heretically back-sliding on a few key doctrines. Rather, I suggest, Kant is deeply philosophically committed to a conception of God, and to immortality, and to a transcendent dimension underlying and sustaining everything that appears, which dimension is a source of spiritual and moral challenge and consolation. As such, Kant witnesses to a pre- and post-Christian tradition in Western philosophy, of being committed to belief in God, and in a universe saturated with reason and divinity. This tradition is an important, albeit submerged, dimension of Enlightenment thought.

LECTURE TWO BECOMING DIVINE: KANT’S AUTONOMOUS SELF   Kant’s ideal moral community, the Kingdom of Ends, is a state where all rational agents successfully and harmoniously ‘give themselves’ the moral law. To be ‘autonomous’ is to be a participant in this ideal community. God remains in the picture, but as the guarantor of the possibility of happiness subsequent upon this self-lawgiving. From the perspective of traditional theology, this rather looks like side-lining God to a subsidiary and supportive role, rather than God being the main object of our will and understanding. But there is another way of looking at it, which comes to light when we think less in terms of Kant and Christianity, and more in terms of Kant and a perennial Platonism. There is a sense in which the whole moral community of the ‘Kingdom of Ends’, and the state of being autonomous, has something divine about it. The lecture explores the suggestion that Kant’s conception of autonomy is recognisably oriented around some classical philosophical conceptions of divinity, with memories of (divine) thought-thinking-itself, joyously diffusing itself, and generating plenitude and harmony, of which spatial and temporal lawfulness is a mere moving image.  

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