Theological Origins of Modernity

the contradictions of enlightenment 259
proceed freely in this direction. . . . Th e inclination to and vocation for free
thinking . . . fi nally even infl uences the principles of government, which
fi nds that it can profi t by treating men, who are now more than machines,
in accord with their dignity.” 11
While Kant perhaps never doubted that universal enlightenment and
the rule of reason could be attained, he recognized, especially from his
reading of Hume, that there were powerful reasons to doubt that the notion
of reason that modern thinkers employed could provide the foundation
for the two great goals of modern thought, the mastery of nature
through modern science and the realization of human freedom. Th ese
doubts arose from the fact that reason itself seemed inevitably and ineluctably
to become entangled in aporiae and contradiction. Th ese aporiae or,
as Kant called them, antinomies, threatened to undermine the modern
project of mathesis universalis and leave humanity lost in the abyss of
Humean skepticism.
Kant fi rst considered the problem of the antinomies in his dissertation
(1770), he but did not appreciate their full signifi cance until aft er reading
Hume. In the period before he began writing the Critique of Pure Reason
(published in 1781), he came to understand their deeper signifi cance. He
explained this in a letter to Garve on September 26, 1798, asserting that
it was “not the investigation of the existence of God, of immorality, etc.
but the antinomy of pure reason . . . from which I began. : ‘Th e world has
a beginning—:it has no beginning, etc., to the fourth [?] Th ere is freedom
in human being,—against there is no freedom and everything is natural
necessity’; it was this that fi rst woke me from my dogmatic slumber and
drove me to the critique of reason itself to dissolve the scandal of the contradiction
of reason with itself.” 12 Th e central reference here is to the Th ird
Antinomy (the seventy-four year old Kant misspeaks himself in his reference
to the Fourth Antinomy). Th is antinomy purports to show that it is
impossible to give a meaningful causal explanation of the whole without
the assumption of a fi rst cause through freedom, and yet that the very possibility
of such freedom undermines the necessity of any causal explanation.
13 In other words, modern natural science, which analyzes all motion
in terms of effi cient causes, is unintelligible without a freely acting fi rst
cause such as God or man, but such causality through freedom, which
is essential to morality, is incompatible with natural necessity. Freedom
is thus both necessary to causality and incompatible with it. Kant recognized
that if this conclusion were correct, the modern project was selfcontradictory
and that modern reason could give man neither the mastery
of nature nor the freedom that he so desired.