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

concerned with disciplining desire and becoming disinterested about God.
Indifference replaces interest as the motivating theoretical force.
Moreover, such restrictions on love of the divine lead also to limitations on piety
itself, for Kant, like Herder and Goethe before him, identifies piety with a constant
desire for union with God and a consequent withdrawal from the finite. Kant therefore
makes clear, in opposition to all ‘religious fanatics’: ‘In practising religious we do
not… find ourselves in a state of devotion, i.e. in a mood directed to the immediate
contemplation of God, and withdrawn from all sensible objects.’ (ibid, 27:731)
Fanaticism involves a withdrawal from the world, an attempt to live on a divine plane
instead of a human one. Such fanaticism, Kant continues, runs the risk of bigotry and
hypocrisy, for there is no means of distinguishing genuine and fake mystic
experience. In all these problematic forms of religious display, there is ‘an ostentatio
pietatis’, a shameless display of religious feeling. On the other hand, Kant
recommends a ‘pudor pietatis which consists in a bashfulness about avoiding in one’s
actions any suspicion of bigotry.’ (ibid, 27:732) Religion consists not in the
cultivation of piety, but instead in restraint of piety, the limitation of desire for God
and of any ‘delusion’ concerning humanity’s ability to fuse with Him. 20
Kant makes a similar point in the Religion. He berates the individual who believes
that ‘to become a better human being… [he must] busy himself with piety (which is a
passive respect of the divine law) rather than with virtue (which is the deployment of
one’s forces in the observance of the duty which he respects).’ Instead, Kant advises,
‘It is this virtue, combined with piety, which alone can constitute the idea we
understand by the word divine blessedness (true religious disposition).’ (1998, 6:201)