Roger Scruton - Philosopher on Dover Beach essays

In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant struck such a blow against the traditional arguments of theology as to leave that science in a condition of self-doubt from which it has never recovered. Nevertheless religion survived; it was Kants declared hope, indeed, that, by destroying the claims of Reason, he had made room for those of Faith. It may not be possible to deduce the existence of a necessary being from the premiss of the worlds contingency; yet a true understanding of the world and of our place as free beings within it opens the way, he thought, to a religious experience that is all the more secure through being independent of theology. Through the moral law, and the act of obedience which it compels from us, we are presented with so vivid an intimation of transcendence, as to want nothing that is needed for the worship of God.

In The Critique of Practical Reason, Kant went further, arguing that practical reason, which is the foundation of morality, could provide a substitute for theology, a new science of the divine which would uphold the very system of beliefs that traditional theology had sought in vain to justify. We need not follow Kant into these difficult regions in order to feel some sympathy for the idea which originally inspired him: the idea that morality, far from depending on the belief in God, provides a unique and vivid support for it. So persuaded was Kant, however, by the view that morality is the ground rather than the consequent of religion, that he allowed himself to describe the moral life in terms borrowed directly from liturgical tradition. The worship due to God became a kind of reverence for the moral law. The faith which transcends belief became the certainty of practical reason, which surpasses understanding. The object of esteem was not the Supreme Being, but the supreme attribute of Reason.The moral order was the realm of grace, the actual community of rational beings the mystical body in the world of nature, and the Kingdom of God to which mortals aspire became the Kingdom of Ends which they make real through their self-legislation.

Thus, in providing a moral basis for religious doctrine, Kant presented a thoroughly theologized morality, one which preserved, in transfigured form, the basic conceptions of Christian doctrine. It is not surprising, therefore, if Nietzsche, in his persona as Antichrist, should have sought to undo the work of this catastrophic spider. The web of sophistication which Kant had spun around the Christian religion was torn to shreds. Nietzsche was one of the officious housemaids who savaged it; the other was Marx. Both wished to destroy the authority of Christian doctrine by providing a naturalistic explanation a genealogy of our belief in it. For Nietzsche, Christianity, and the Kantian morality which now sits bareheaded upon the grave thereof, are illusions of the resentful, distorting mirrors in which the strong are crumpled and the cripples stand tall. For Marx, religion was the controlling ideology of the powerful, which translates the artifice of power into a natural order and a gift of God. For both of them, the inherited religion of the West is not just an untruth, but a sophisticated lie.

The Nietzschean and Marxian explanations of Christian belief are incompatible. It is therefore somewhat surprising that the two philosophies are not more fervently at loggerheads, that Marxists do not devote pages to the refutation of the Nietzschean theory of ressentiment, and Nietzscheans pages to the refutation of the Marxist theories of ideology and class. A Marxist, wishing to increase the power of the powerless, seeks to destroy religion; if a Nietzschean joins with him in the work of destruction, however, it is because he seeks to take away from the powerless the little power that they have. Nevertheless, both Marxists and Nietzscheans rest secure in the belief that either of their explanations will undermine the credibility of the thing explained. This undermining of belief is the real source of the appeal of both philosophies the sense that the world is being rid of faith, mystery and illusion; that we are coming face to face with a bare reality, and also with ourselves as part of that reality, the disillusioned centre of an ungoverned world.