2025 Theses Doctoral

Rational Belief as Moral Orientation and the Conditions for Hope in Kant's Practical Philosophy

Jacobs, Ethan Henry

What may I hope? From his Critical period onward, Kant repeatedly confirmed the centrality of this question to his conception of what philosophy is in the business of addressing, in the first Critique, in several redactions of material associated with his lectures on logic and on metaphysics in the 1780s and 1790s, and in a 1793 letter to Karl Friedrich Stäudlin, a theologian influenced by Kant’s writings. Nonetheless, for those who take seriously the importance of hope in Kant’s thinking, the roles of hope and its objects have been frequently marred by an overly simplistic construal of the latter: on these accounts, we may hope for a world amenable to our moral strivings, and so to that extent we may rationally believe in the real possibility of its condition, and in particular, God.

Using Kant’s own analogization of rational belief (Vernunftglaube) as a feeling of rational agency that orients us with respect to supersensible objects, I develop a richer account of hope and its objects consistent with the basic structure of the simplistic construal while showing that the specific articulation of rational belief plays an important diagnostic role in relating to ourselves as autonomous agents capable of and responsible for moral strivings in the world, and hence to that world itself.

I argue that while hope and rational belief play different roles in justifying our purchase on supersensible objects like God, rational belief does more than merely shore up whatever is needed to ground what we may hope for, instead serving as a kind of articulatory tool with which to measure and evaluate the prospects for our moral strivings. For, registering our world as amenable to our moral strivings is a matter of, in part, satisfying the interest we have in being regarded as autonomous agents in a way that suitably recognizes and thereby overcomes the obstacles in the way of that interest’s satisfaction: the contingencies of the world, of our interactions with our fellow inhabitants, and of our transcendental and psychological makeup. And to overcome these contingencies is a matter of seeing them as either necessary – as recognizing them as the hinges upon which our moral strivings may profitably turn –, or else as sufficiently fleeting and non-systematically encumbering that our moral strivings are not practically impossible.

Understanding Kant’s philosophically sophisticated account of rational belief as orienting us in our hope (and despair) towards the prospects for our becoming autonomous agents in the world (rather than merely in some enclosed noumenal realm) is important not only for the light it sheds on his approach to thinking about philosophy, its method, and its aims as a whole, but also as a basis from which to better grasp the critiques thereof by later German idealists, including Hegel, who can be understood to offer a critique focused on articulating the objective and institutional conditions for the inculcation of rational belief (and hence hope) insufficiently adumbrated in Kant’s analysis.