Towards the radical Enlightenment : Spinoza and Kant on religion

Against a background of the distinction between the radical and the moderate enlightenment, popularized recently by Jonathan Israel, the paper focuses on selected views on religion, formulated, on the one hand, by Spinoza, the herald of the radical enlightenment, and, on the other hand, by Kant, an epitome of the enlightenment as such, pointing to affinities between the two thinkers. Critically addressing Israel’s characterization of Kant as belonging to the moderate camp, I highlight a number of Kant’s claims concerning religion that can be considered quite radical. Among these claims there is, for example, one that the Scriptures do not have much of the cognitive, but more of the didactic value, or that the true religion originates from human reason, or that the putative experience of the supernatural should be examined in the light of the idea of the divinity as provided by reason. Claims such as these, I argue, take Kant closer to the radical enlightenment than scholars like Israel would be ready to admit, if Kant’s radicalism we understand as a thorough re-conception of the meaning, origins, and the role of religion, along the lines of the project described by such historians as, e.g., Margaret Jacob or Jonathan Sheehan