KANT AND THE

ENLIGHTENMENT
PROJECT
An Introductory Exploration
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTIONS
1. We may fault the Enlightenment for its exaggerated claims,
but we may also possibly retrieve its legitimate concerns and
so to appropriate them for today’s challenges?
2. One of the fundamental assumptions of EP is the disjunction
and separation of faith and reason, is it possible to propose a
mediating model?
3. EP also makes science as the paradigm for knowledge. If so
what are implications for the theological enterprise in the
present?
4. Tradition and Authority are important categories for
theological thinking, but how we should construe such
notions in the light Enlightenment critique?
FEATURES OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT PERIOD

1. Faith and the claims of religion were no longer taken

for granted. Religion had to earn the right to be heard.
 The authority of religion is now undermined, questioned
and suspected.
 The cosmos can now be mastered through scientific
method.
 Humans, and not God is now at the center of history and
meaning.
 If so then God must be oriented now to human
subjectivities.
 
2. Optimistic Anthropology
 Easily assumes the unlimited power of reason

 Man as essentially good. Evil is rooted in ignorance

or darkness. Hence, we need only to educate or
enlighten humanity.
 Thus history must be understood as marching towards
inevitable progress. In fact for Kant, Enlightenment
must be understood as an exit or way out from the
status of immaturity. Humanity has come of age now.
3 .The authority of revelation is
replaced by the authority of reason:
Reason as ultimate and self-
sufficient or autonomous.

 
PRECURSORS OF ENLIGHTENMENT

1. Religious Wars (Thirty Years War)-

undermined the validity of doctrinal disputes.
2. Rene Descartes- initiated a “turn” to the
subject or the human self as the guarantor of
“certain knowledge”; the transcendental ego as
providing the point of departure to build the
foundation of knowledge.
3. ScientificRevolutions- affirm the limitless
power of human reason. Natural Science
presides now as judge concerning the “true”
and “valid” knowledge.
 The method of mathematics and science was
considered as the only valid method to arrive at
“certain” and well founded knowledge.
 PRINCIPLES OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Reason- which assumes that there is complete continuity

between reality and the structure of the human mind.
Nature- possesses “laws of nature” discoverable by
reason.
Harmony- as the principle of the ethical life.
Autonomy- nothing must be accepted unless approved by
reason; outside reason is heteronomy, a lapse into
immaturity.
 
A SKETCH OF KANT’S PHILOSOPHICAL
PROJECT

1. Kant saw his project as a sort of “Copernican

Revolution” in his theory of knowledge: Knowledge
of reality is conditioned by the mind and its
conceptual apparatus.
Although all our knowledge begins with experience,
they do not arise simply out of experience. Something
more is involve.
  Take the case of causality as an example, that: Every
event has a cause.
2. Against the empiricists, Kant insisted that the mind is
active in the knowing process. The mind synthesizes
the impressions provided for us by our sense-
experience. Two prime formal categories of the mind
are space and time which enables us to experience
realities external to us.
3. Kant distinguished between phenomena- objects
present in the experience of the human knower,
and noumena- objects that lie beyond sense-
experience.
The cognitive apparatus is not capable to
experience realities beyond the sense-experience.
 
4. In Kant’s preface to his Critique of Pure
Reason, he was concern about the problem of
certain knowledge (or epistemology).
He observes that the natural sciences apparently
have advanced already on this concern.
Metaphysics, however, “are far from having
attained to the certainty of scientific progress
and rather to be merely groping about in the
dark” (p.5).
 His purpose: “…to indicate the path along which
theoretical reason must travel” that is, to delimit
the boundaries of the sciences. “We do not
enlarge but disfigure the sciences when we lose
sight of their respective limits and allow them to
run into one another.”
 
He proposes what for him the more fitting model for
scientific progress and revolution, namely: “Reason
must approach nature with the view, indeed of
receiving information from it, not however, in the
character of a pupil, who listens to all that his master
chooses to tell him, but in that of a judge, who compels
the witness to reply those question which he thinks fit
to propose.”
 This suggests that if knowledge and sciences are
to make significant progress we have to be in
command as to the limits, powers, and
possibilities of our conceptual apparatus.
According to Heidegger, however, this model
looks at nature as something that we are in
command of: challenging and demanding it for
our instrumental purposes (instrumental reason).
 
He observes further that the mathematical and
natural science model in his time woks within
the framework that “our cognition must
conform to objects” (p.7). By contrast, Kant’s
experimental proposal was to “assume that the
objects must conform to our cognition.” This is
what makes his project comparable to a sort of
“Copernican Revolution”.
 Kant further observes an apparent conflict
between science and religion (and ethics).
That is, if according to science the
universe is controlled by mechanical laws.
How can there be God and moral
freedom?
 
 Kant thus has two fundamental aims in his
philosophical project:

1. To protect and promote the progress of science, but

at the same time…

2. To save the three important metaphysical postulates,

namely: God, freedom, and immortality of the soul.