IV. The Philosophy of Reconciliation

The Ethic forms the weakest side of the Kantian Philosophy. And all the same it is just through the Ethic that it has won its greatest success, because it met very powerful needs of the time.

The French Materialism had been a philosophy of the fight against the traditional methods of thought, and consequently against the institutions which rested on them. An irreconcilable hatred against Christianity made it the watchword, not only of the fight against the church, but of that against all the social and political forces which were bound up with it.

Kant’s Critique of the Pure Reason equally drives Christianity from out of the Temple; but the discovery of the origin of the moral law, which is brought about by the Critique of the Practical Reason, opens for it again the door with all due respect. Thus through Kant, Philosophy became, instead of a weapon of the fight against the existing methods of thought and institutions, a means of reconciling the antagonisms.

But the way of development is that of struggle. The reconciliation of antagonisms implies the stoppage of development. Thus the Kantian Philosophy became a conservative factor.

The greatest advantage thereby was drawn by theology. It emancipated this from the quandary, into which the traditional belief had fallen through the development of science, in that it rendered it possible to reconcile science and religion.

“No other science,” says Zeller, “experienced the influence of the Kantian Philosophy in a higher degree than the Theology. Here Kant found the soil best prepared for his principles; with that, however, he brought to the traditional methods of thought a reform and an increase in depth, which it was badly in need of.” (Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie, 1873, p.519.)

Just after the outbreak of the French Revolution a specially strong need arose for a theology, which was in a position to hold its own against materialism, and to drive it out of the field among educated people. Zeller writes then further.

“Kant’s religious views corresponded exactly both to the moral and intellectual need of the time; it recommended itself to the enlightened by its reasonableness, its independence of the positive, its purely practical tendency; to the religious by its moral severity and its lofty conceptions of Christianity and its founder. German theology from now on took Kant as their authority.” His Moral Theology became after a few years the foundation on which Protestant theology in Germany almost without exception, even the Catholic to a very large extent, was built up. The Kantian Philosophy, exercised for that reason, that the majority of German theologians for close on fifty years took their start from it, a highly permanent and far-reaching influence on the general education.

Vorländer quotes in his History of Philosophy (Leipzig 1903) the word of a modern German Theologian, Ritschl, who declared:

“Thus the development of the method of knowledge by Kant implied at the same time a practical rebirth of Protestantism. (Vol. II, p. 476.)”

The great Revolution created the soil for the influence of Kant, which was strongest in the two decades after the Terror. Then this influence became paler and paler. The Bourgeoisie acquired after the thirties, even in Germany, strength and courage for more decided struggles against the existing forms of State and thought, and to an absolute recognition of the world of the senses as the only real one. Thus through the Hegelian dialectic there arose new forms of Materialism, and just in the most vigorous form in Germany, for the very reason that their Bourgeoisie was well behind that of France and England; because they had not conquered the existing state machine; because they had that still to upset, therefore they required a fighting philosophy and not one of reconciliation.

In the last decades, however, their desire to fight has greatly diminished. Even though they have not attained all that they wish, yet they have all which was necessary for their development. Further struggles on a large scale, energetic fights against the existing, must be of much less use to them than to their great enemy, the proletariat, that grew in a most menacing fashion and now for its part required a fighting philosophy. This was so much the more susceptible to the influence of materialism, the more the development of the world of the senses showed the absurdity of the existing order and the necessity of its victory.

The Bourgeoisie, on the other hand, became more and more susceptible to a philosophy of reconciliation, and thus Kantism was aroused to a fresh life. This resurrection was prepared in the reactionary period after 1848 by the then commencing influence of Schopenhauer.

But in the last decade the influence of Kant has found its way into Economics and Socialism. Since the laws of Bourgeois Society, which were discovered by the Classical Economists, showed themselves more clearly as laws which made the class war and the disappearance of the Capitalist order necessary, the Bourgeois Economists took refuge in the Kantian Moral Code, which being independent of Time and Space must be in a position to reconcile the class antagonisms and prevent the Revolutions which take place in Space and Time.

Side by side with the ethical school in Economics we got an ethical Socialism, when endeavors were made in our ranks to modify the class antagonisms, and to meet at least a section of the Bourgeoisie half way. This policy of Reconciliation also began with the cry: Back to Kant! And with a repudiation of materialism, since it denies the Freedom of the Will.

Despite the categoric imperative, which the Kantian Ethic cries to the individual, its historical and social tendency, from the very beginning on till today, has been that of toning down, of reconciling the antagonisms, not of overcoming them through struggle.