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CHAPTER THREE CHALLENGE OF THE IDEALIST REVOLUTION IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT: RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF IMMANUEL KANT Reason Addressing Religion’s Perennial Questions Signs of subversion of the Enlightenment as established by Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Wolff, and signs of the idealist revolu- tion that took place in the German Enlightenment, were already in formation when Mendelssohn wrote his two last philosophical works, Jerusalem and Morning Lessons. The last was written as an impassioned response to the philosophical and personal attack of the religious Romantics Friedrich Jacobi and Georg Hamann against the rational- ists of the Enlightenment in general, and against Lessing and Men- delssohn in particular.1 Jacobi and Hamann presented Mendelssohn and Lessing as secret disciples of Spinoza, digging secretly under the foundations of Judaism and Christianity together. Before he was free to respond to these arguments, there appeared Kant’s revolutionary philosophical work Critique of Pure Reason, that ousted the Leibnitz-Wolff philosophy from the German academy and would eventually enthrone in its place the idealist philosophy—established by him and by his principal disciples and critics: Fichte, Maimon, Hegel, and Schelling. Jacobi and Hamann argued that every rationalistic philosophy, as such, is anti-religious in its essence, and that it is completely absurd to speak of faith and reason as of two sides of the same coin. Thus, they rejected out of hand Mendelssohn’s doctrine of tolerance and subverted his life’s hope—to combine Judaism with the Enlightenment and to integrate it into the fabric of modern humanist culture without surrendering its identity. 1 Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelsohn, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); Johann Georg Hamann, “Golgatha und Scheblimini. Von einem Prediker in der Wüste”, (Gütersloh: Brock- haus Verlag, 1999). 118 chapter three Kant had been among the many responders to Jerusalem; he related to Mendelssohn with admiration which followed from the latter’s essential identification with the Enlightenment and with humanism. But Kant regarded as strange and self-contradictory Mendelssohn’s desire to combine emancipation with preserving the religious-halakhic Jewish identity. In Kant’s major philosophical work, he undermined the epistemological foundations of all his predecessors, including Leib- nitz, thus in effect pulling the philosophical rug out from under Men- delssohn’s project.2 As we said, in Morning Lessons Mendelssohn defended himself, Less- ing, and to a certain extent also Spinoza from the charge of secret heresy, and sought to demonstrate that Spinoza’s pantheism was only a philosophical error committed in all innocence by a man whose exalted ethical conduct was worth the testimony of a hundred wit- nesses to the purity of his faith. Thus, Mendelssohn sought to reassert his fundamental premise, that religion and reason complement each other, and that Judaism is in every respect a purely rational religion. However, Mendelssohn did not attempt to respond to Kant’s critical challenge. He acknowledged that he had not the strength to come up with new arguments to grapple with the idealist revolution. Thus, he cleared the stage and left it for those who would come after him. In any case, from that point on, every new philosophical attempt to reconstruct the enlightened Jewish stance of Mendelssohn—a combi- nation of faith and reason, together with defense of Judaism’s unique- ness through its integration in the enlightened state and humanistic culture—had to contend on the basis of the idealistic foundation that Kant and his disciples laid. Just as the philosophy of Plato and Aris- totle (and their Arab followers Avicenna, Averroes, and others) was absorbed into medieval Jewish religious philosophy, and just as the philosophy of Leibnitz and Wolff was absorbed as the foundational layer of Mendelssohn’s Jewish religious philosophy, so the idealism of Kant and his two greatest disciple-critics, Hegel and Schelling, was absorbed as the foundational layer of the Jewish religious philosophy 2 In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant refuted all proofs for God, immortality of the soul, and freedom of the will as hubristic pretensions of reason exceeding its proper boundaries (though he later went on to reaffirm them as postulates of practical reason in Critique of Practical Reason)..

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