In this course we will discuss the history of some ideas that have been hugely influential in the modern west and that were taken out to the rest of the world. The discussion centers on an extraordinary and historically important figure, a sixteenth century German man named Martin Luther. Luther is recognized today as the originator of many of the most significant ideas that continue to affect and shape who we as modern people are and how we see the world and ourselves for better and for worse. In the first section, we will explore why Luther thought the Bible was the most important volume for everyone to have and read. Included here will be a careful consideration of Luther's anti-Judaism, which contributed to western antisemitism and some of the greatest horrors of the twentieth century. In the second section, we will talk about the idea of freedom and how Luther's understanding of freedom in Christ affected the way modern thinkers understood what it means to be human in community. Important in this section is the consequential contradiction between freedom and slavery in western thought and their co-existence in western societies. The third section will be all about the many complicated relations between religion and politics. NOTE: Students wishing to sign up for free access to all instructional course content should click on the "Sign-In" button in the upper right hand corner. Those who wish to take the course and complete a certificate that requires payment, please click the Enroll button on the left side of this page.
Kant and Freedom
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From the course by Northwestern University
Luther and the West
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Meet the Instructors
Christine HelmerArthur E. Andersen Teaching and Research Professor, Professor of Religious Studies and German
Department of Religious Studies
In 1793, the German philosopher
Immanuel Kant wrote a book called "Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason".
He wanted to publish it,
of course, as all authors do,
but first he needed to get the manuscript approved by Prussian censors.
Kant knew the book was dangerous.
He knew he had not portrayed the Christian faith
in a way that was acceptable to the Prussian church.
The book advocated religious and civil freedoms at a time when there was a struggle
between proponents of the new Enlightenment ideas and the conservative authorities.
So Kant decided not to implicate the Prussian censors and instead had the manuscript
published in the neighboring university town called
Jena that was known for more tolerant views.
"Religion within the Bounds of Reason" became one
of the most important books of all time.
The book was so important,
so radical and so revolutionary because it brought
Luther's idea about freedom into the modern world.
Kant is known as the preeminent philosopher of modernity because he investigated
the distinctly modern question of what it
means to be a person who is free to think and act.
He was born into an offshoot of Lutheranism called Pietism,
which was a movement in European Protestantism that flourished in the 1600s and 1700s.
The Pietists emphasized two themes that became
crucially important for Kant: (1) the freedom of the inner self;
and, (2) the relationship between Christianity and the moral life freely lived.
Such freedom was exactly what Kant lacked in Königsberg,
the freedom to ask new questions and propose new answers
even when they might threaten social institutions such as the Church.
He was committed to the idea that freedom is
the fundamental characteristic and condition of all human activity.
Throughout his philosophical works,
Kant upheld freedom as the capacity to choose between good and evil.
As we will see for Kant,
freedom and reason go hand in hand.
The question that Kant wrestled with his whole life was what it means to have freedom to
think for oneself and act in moral ways that facilitate the creation of communities.
Kant addresses three fundamental questions in his work,
all of which have to do with reason.
He asked, "What can I know?"
"What must I do?"
"What may I hope?"
On the first question,
he wrote an entire treatise,
"The Critique of Pure Reason" published in 1781,
followed by a revised version in 1787.
In it, Kant investigated the human capacity for knowledge about God,
the Soul, and the world as a whole.
He explains that necessary concepts or categories form the basis of our experience,
specifically concepts about the world as it appears to us.
Kant also argued that reason has specific limits and deny that there
could be theoretical knowledge of questions in metaphysics and theology.
However, he affirmed his intention to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith,
as he writes in "The Critique of Pure Reason".
He addressed this issue of faith in the books that followed.
The question "What must I do?"
is the subject of Kant's "Critique of Practical Reason" which he published in 1788 and
of "Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason" which
examined the question specifically in relation to religion.
"What must I do?" is a moral question,
and in these two later works,
Kant aimed to orient religion to ethics.
According to Kant, to act ethically means to be human.
In order to connect religion to his interest in ethics,
Kant resorted to a new understanding of freedom.
Freedom, he said, is the basis for moral choice.
He located this moral freedom in what Luther would have called the inner self.
This inner aspect of the self,
as we have learned from Luther,
involves the central core that characterizes a person.
While for Luther, inner freedom is related to Christ,
freedom for Kant is what determines
a person's choice to orient the entire self to good or evil.
Kant uses the term transcendental freedom.
Transcendental freedom involves the capacity and the decision to act morally.
What a person may hope for depends precisely on both this resolution and these actions.
In the next lecture, we'll look at how Kant thinks
transcendental freedom can lead to ethically responsible actions.
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