Kant, You Romantic Fool

The last time we looked at the Theology of the Body we examined the philosophical roots of TOB, discussing the shift in the common world view after about 1500. In doing so I jumped over a few centuries to get to the idea of reductionism: that reality can be reduced to function, with no spiritual dimension to the material world. We should go back a bit though to see more clearly how we got to that point. There is one thinker who had tremendous influence on John Paul II, and really on all contemporary thought, who must be dealt with before going on.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a Prussian philosopher who spent almost his entire life in his hometown, never traveling more than a hundred miles from where he was born. In spite of his limited background his influence has been great. His work summed up and answered the philosophers that came before him, and all the philosophers that came after him have had to react to him in some way. His thought is too far reaching to summarize in a short space, so I’ll concentrate on the things that concern us most directly: his ideas on free will and the human person.

For Kant, to be human was to exercise free with without limits. This is not to say he didn’t believe in morality; he held to a very strict moral code. For him to be moral means acting in accordance with reason, so that what is irrational is also immoral. Any action that is based on desire, emotion or motivated by pleasure does not meet the standard of a rational act, and is thus immoral and dehumanizing. Any act that uses another person, not respecting his or her autonomy limits free will, and so is also immoral. Kant thought sex was dehumanizing because it is an action born of desire, emotion and, you got it, the seeking of pleasure. In his view sex partners are using each other as objects. This violates the individual’s free will and is immoral. Sex could be justified if the goal was procreation, which is rationally needed for the continuation of the human race, but for no other reason. As you can tell, Kant wasn’t big on Valentine’s Day; in fact he was never married.

It’s amazing to me that Kant was a devout Lutheran, and part of his goal was to set up a system that allowed for faith and the spiritual at a time when philosophers were becoming more and more materialistic. But his teaching on free will, which builds on Francis Bacon, soon became detached from his strict morality as questions over what is rational and who sets the standards of rationality rose up in later decades. Rather than safeguarding human dignity, Kant’s thought gave rise to increasingly individualistic philosophies that promoted the exercise of free will for the good of the individual or society, but often at the expense of others.

The challenge that John Paul II faced was maintaining the centrality of free will while convincing people that Christian morality is the highest way of using that freedom. Keep in mind that JPII was a philosopher, and he tried to use a new philosophical school to answer modern objections to faith. More on phenomenology next time.