Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is a notoriously difficult book even compared with the rest of the Kantian corpus There is in the literature no consensus regarding what Kant s intentions were in writing it nor whether it is compatible with the Transcendental Idealism of his three Critiques G. E Michalson has dismissed it as an incoherent series of wobbles between Kant s competing Christian and Enlightenment commitments Similarly Nicholas Wolterstorff has painted it as the locus of a number of unresolved conundrums Somewhat dramatically John E Hare has declared the project a failure. Other commentators on the other hand have understood Kant s project in Religion not only as internally coherent but as a valuable contribution to the broader critical project In this camp we find Chris Firestone and Nathan Jacobs who understand Religion as outlining the transcendental conditions of moral improvement and Stephen Palmquist who has recently written a much acclaimed Comprehensive Commentary that I have yet to read mea culpa mea culpa but who claims to demonstrate that Kant s arguments are not only cogent but have clear and profound practical applications to the way religion is actually practiced in the world today. With his contribution to the Routledge Philosophy Guidebook series Lawrence Pasternack inserts himself into the latter school of thought From the outset he sets himself the objective of showing that Religion is internally coherent i. e is not a failure Pasternack opens the book with a long chapter on Kant s doctrine of the Highest Good as developed in the three Critiques With considerable expertise he demonstrates that far from representing a single consistent vision Kant s argument for the Highest Good evolves throughout the critical period in response to changes in his account of moral motivation and to perceived weaknesses in earlier versions of the argument The most salient benefits of this analysis are two In the first place by carefully distinguishing between the Highest Good as an ideal a maximal state of happiness in proportion with virtue and the Highest Good as a duty to make ourselves worthy of populating said ideal Pasternack convincingly strikes down the common misreading according to which Kant saddles us with an impossible duty to promote the distribution of happiness in accordance with moral worth In the second place by his meticulous reading of the Critique of the Power of Judgment he shows that again contrary to a popular misreading Kant never abandons the Postulate of Immortality and reimagines the Highest Good as a this worldly secular ideal From here he goes into Religion proper As he understands it the book in its entirety must be understood as an extension of the doctrine of the Highest Good in that it answers the question how we can make ourselves well pleasing to God i. e how we can make ourselves worthy of populating the Highest Good After a short chapter on Religion s two prefaces Pasternack takes up the four parts of the book in order Part One sets up the problem namely that human beings are by nature evil Although they possess three predispositions to the good in the form of predispositions to animality sociability and personality Kant argues that human beings are also afflicted with a propensity to evil that causes them to reverse the moral ordering of their maxims and to place self interest ahead of the moral law In a notoriously confusing passage Kant maintains that their being evil can be understood as both innate and chosen Pasternack clears this up by distinguishing between the propensity to evil itself and the evil character Gesinnung choice by which we set the order of our maxims the propensity is innate but the Gesinnung choice remains our responsibility He also seeks to clear up the difficult question of the grounds on which Kant can plausibly claim that all human beings are evil by distinguishing between the strict universality of the claim that we all possess a propensity to evil and the comparative universality of the claim that we reverse the proper order of our maxims Part Two of Religion presents Kant s solution to the problem of radical evil human beings must undergo a Change of Heart by which they restore the proper order to their supreme maxim In Religion this change is facilitated by what practical faith in what Kant calls the Prototype of Humanity which is the idea of a human being untainted by sin This is perhaps the point at which Pasternack s analysis begins to falter Instead of following Firestone and Jacobs s depiction of the Prototype as a new postulate of practical reason and transcendental condition of the Change of Heart Pasternack understands it on the model of the first Critique s regulative ideas as nothing than a useful representation of reason In other words Kant s answer to the question how we can become not merely better men but new men is a naively optimistic and not entirely reassuring Just believe in yourself In Parts Three and Four Kant turns his attention from the individual to the collective He maintains that a person having undergone the Change of Heart is nonetheless in constant danger from recidivism In Part Three he seeks to remedy this situation by means of what he calls the Ethical Community or the people of God united under ethical laws His claim is that to safeguard their commitment to morality human beings who have undergone the Change of Heart and who therefore share a commitment to the Highest Good have a duty to organize themselves into a community of the righteous which he understands as a Universal Church In Part Four Kant draws a distinction between authentic and counterfeit service to God and warns against elevating the contingent rituals and observances of the Church to the status of duties necessary to salvation Pasternack s main contribution in this regard is his explanation of recidivism in terms of the unsocial sociability associated with our predisposition to humanity. Pasternack s Guidebook will be an interesting read for anyone interested in Kant s philosophy of religion However the intended audience of is unclear with the result that it will likely feel a little underwhelming to the scholar and a little too complex to the lay reader On the one hand Pasternack s study lacks the profound originality of truly great scholarship e. g Firestone and Jacobs s In Defense of Kant s Religion Palmquist s Kant s Critical Religion and sometimes passes over topics that need attention see above on the Prototype of Humanity On the other it sometimes goes into such detail into particulars that while interesting to scholars it is likely to confuse and alienate anyone who does not already have a good grasp on Kant s work Nonetheless from a scholarly perspective the chapters on the Highest Good and on Part One of Religion do an impressive job at clearing up some of the enduring conceptual muddles around Kant s philosophy of religion and would on their own provide sufficient warrant for picking up the book Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kant on Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason Routledge Philosophy GuideBooks., e not just a series of conundrums that it respects the limits set on knowledge by Kant s critical philosophy i. e doesn t wobble and most importantly that it compellingly addresses the question of salvation i
