Abstract
This is a response given at the book launch for Christopher Insole’s Kant and the Divine: From Contemplation to the Moral Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), hosted jointly, in November 2020, by the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University, and the Australian Catholic University. The response focuses on the continuity and rupture that Insole claims to find between Kant’s early and late philosophy, and draws attention to an aesthetic sensibility across Kant’s thought: a Platonic and rationalist aesthetics which focuses on the qualities of harmony, plenitude and perfection that Insole finds to be the ‘base notes’ of Kant’s thought.
I am so happy to be part of this celebration of Chris’s book. Magisterial is no doubt an overused word, but it is definitely the most fitting description of Kant and the Divine. In fact, each chapter of this book is magisterial.
It will clearly be closely read and discussed by Kant scholars for years to come, and it makes a particularly important contribution to my own field—of philosophical theology, or perhaps theological philosophy—in any case, the kind of historically-engaged, textually-sensitive philosophy often done best nowadays by scholars in theology departments. For anyone even slightly oriented to the history of philosophy, Kant stands—alongside Descartes—as a giant, a pivot, a watershed in the tradition. Kant is so frequently invoked as a philosophical and theological turning-point, but very often in a rather broad-brush way: sometimes his name stands as a cipher for subjectivism, voluntarism, modernity. His works themselves are not so often read by theologians. This is, I think, forgivable: it takes a long time to read Kant, and for me at least it is hard work to get through a single paragraph of Kant’s prose. After years immersed in Kant’s whole corpus, Chris has produced a book that is truly a great gift to philosophical theology: a rigorous, nuanced, original, meticulous, bold, philosophically astute and theologically sensitive account of Kant and the divine.
The argument of the book is, as I have said, meticulous, and complex. Chris finds in Kant’s system ‘a consistent and radical split from the Christian tradition, from which Kant, in part, inherits the search for that which is unconditioned and good-without-limit’. 1 This compelling interpretation of Kant’s relation to Christianity leaves open the question of his orientation to the divine. On this question, Chris traces a rupture between Kant’s early thought and his critical philosophy, a deep shift in his thinking about freedom. Yet here Chris finds a balance of continuity and rupture that is, he writes in chapter 17, ‘comparable to a melody being moved from a major to a minor key. In a sense, nothing is quite the same, but, also, nothing is entirely unrelated to what went before’. 2 Throughout Kant’s writings, Chris hears the same ‘base notes of plenitude and harmony’ that are sounded when we contemplate God (as in the pre-critical Kant) and, in the later Kant, in ‘the activity of rational, harmonious, universal willing’. 3
In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant writes that ‘nothing glorifies God more than what is most estimable in the world: respect for his command, observance of the holy duty that his law lays upon us, when there is added to this his magnificent plan of crowning such a beautiful order with corresponding happiness’. 4 Chris quotes this passage in chapter 17 as he explains how, through his work, ‘Kant sings the same song, but has changed the dominant key’. 5
I think both Chris’s words with their musical allusions, and Kant’s words about the glory of the divine, hint at a hidden aesthetics in Chris’s book. I don’t mean what we normally think of as Kantian aesthetics—the theory of ‘judgements of taste’ laid out in the Third Critique—but the older kind of aesthetic sensibility expressed in the inseparable trio of the good, the true, and the beautiful. This is a Platonic, rationalist aesthetics which focuses on precisely the qualities of harmony, plenitude and perfection that Chris shows to be the ‘base notes’ of Kant’s thought. In his treatise on music, Saint Augustine contrasts sensual aesthetic pleasure with the ‘delight in the rhythm of reason’ which arises when our souls are turned to God; for Aquinas, beauty is accessed through the intellect, not the senses or imagination, and he identifies the first requirement of beauty as ‘integrity and perfection’.
Aquinas sees beauty and goodness as fundamentally the same: both are based on form, though goodness relates to the will, to desire, while beauty relates to the intellect. Perhaps Kant could move ‘from contemplation to the moral law’, as Chris puts it, because of this fundamental unity of beauty and goodness.
Although the aesthetic insight at stake here isn’t a sensual or sentimental feeling, it is still a feeling as well as a cognition, which is why we can call it ‘aesthetic’. Spinoza expresses something similar with his concept of intuition, Scientia intuitiva: he regarded this contemplative feeling as the ‘intellectual love of God’, and the ‘highest satisfaction of the mind’.
The feeling of respect, so crucial to Kant’s philosophy, is in this sense aesthetic. It is with this kind of aesthetic sensibility that Kant praises God’s ‘magnificent plan of crowning such a beautiful order with corresponding happiness’. 6
I find in Chris’s response to Kant a similar aesthetic sensibility. His book offers not simply argument and analysis, but, more than this, it models an intellectual sensitivity, a refined appreciation for the order, harmony, integrity and, yes, plenitude in Kant’s philosophy. Human respect can be a deeply moving quality. Reading Kant and the Divine as well as hearing Chris talk about Kant over the years, I have a strong impression that he is moved by Kant’s intellectual magnificence. Without a trace of sentimentality, Chris’s writing communicates the austere beauty and the human warmth within Kant’s philosophy and theology. Chris: many, many congratulations on your wonderful book!