The Discipline of Pious Reason: Goethe, Herder, Kant Daniel ...

Nevertheless, the silence of contemporary philosophy of religion on piety is quite
deafening. Piety seems to elude the critical gaze. It is for such reasons that I will
speak at the end of the essay of the anti-transcendental nature of contemporary
philosophy of religion; it has suppressed the conditions which made it possible. The
obvious question is therefore: What reasons can be given for philosophy of religion’s
suppression of the conditions of its own possibility? This question structures the
present essay. I ask how and why piety ‘became invisible’ and I do so by describing
three ‘scenes’ from the history of ideas which take place at the intersection between
philosophy of religion and moral philosophy: two early poems by Goethe (Ganymed
and Prometheus) a short essay by Herder (Liebe und Selbstheit) and the closing
sections of Kant’s Metaphysik der Sitten. All three dramatise the effacement of piety
from philosophy of religion.
In these ‘scenes’, Goethe, Herder and Kant confront the dominant pieties of their day
and stutteringly articulate alternative, often improper models for relating to what
matters most (i.e. ‘God’). All three are uneasy over how piety is usually conceived, so
try to conceive it differently. The piety being challenged was essentially neoplatonic
and itself had only recently come to dominance as a by-product of the Platorenaissance
in post-1750 Germany. This neoplatonic piety was tethered to the figure
of the One and postulated a future fusion with the divine. The impiety of Goethe,
Herder and Kant focused, on the contrary, on the multiplicity of existence. This
concern for multiplicity was often mediated (oddly enough) through Spinozist ethics.
Neo-Spinozistic impiety designated the manner in which the individual relates to God
as individual, released from the bonds of fusion, mysticism and apotheosis. Impieties
of the multiple were pitted against pieties of the One.