Kant Was No Pietist

Ian Blecher writes:

I am writing a dissertation on Kant, so I was interested (and pleased) to see you mention him today. One thing you wrote was inaccurate, however. You describe Kant as a serious Pietist Christian who nevertheless devised an ostensibly secular ethical system…

In fact, Kant was no kind of Christian at all — let alone a fanatical Pietist. As Manfred Kuehn puts it like this in his biography of Kant (the provocatively titled Kant: A biography), "…Kant himself was not religious and was opposed to any form of external religious worship… [p. 250]"

Kuehn also observes that, according to Kant, "Only moral service will make us pleasing to a moral God. Prayer, liturgy, pilgrimages, and confessions are worthless. [p. 371.]"

It is true that God — the philosophical God, not the Christian God — has an important place in Kant's moral system. (It's also true that his parents were Pietists.) But if we think of Kant as a fanatic — like, say, Swedenborg — it's hard to understand why he would have insisted on the absolute rationality of moral action.

Fair enough, and I stand corrected.

Indeed, the truth probably illustrates the point better than the facts I thought I had. Western people (Kant included), whether or not they're Christians themselves, grow up in a background culture that's heavily influenced by Christianity. And the idea of a "realistic" moral law is a very straightforward consequence of the popular understanding of Christian hell. This may make the idea that ethical rules shouldn't be unduly demanding seem more commonsensical to people than it really ought to be.