Theological Origins of Modernity

notes to pages 259–268 355
Monad (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1960). Th e problem that Hume posed for Kant was
not epistemological: “Hume, whose Enquiry had strongly aff ected Kant, in the
eighth chapter (‘Liberty and Necessity’) brings forth, with all ‘skeptical’ reservations,
a radical determinism and indeed one-sidedly in favor of the causality
according to natural necessity.” Heimsoeth, “Kosmotheologischen,” 218. Kant’s
consideration of the antinomy is a critique of the concepts of the whole or cosmos
as a critique of the mathematical conception of the whole qua world and the
dynamic conception of the whole qua nature. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen
Vernunft , ed. R. Schmidt (Hamburg: Meiner, 1956), A418/B446. In the Th ird Antinomy
Kant considers the possibility of the dynamic or causal structure or synthesis
of the whole.
13. Ibid., A410/B437–A411/B438.
14. Th ere were a number of traditional ways that Cicero had enumerated in which this
might be achieved. Cicero points to ten diff erent means of resolving antinomies.
De inventione 2.49.145–47. Kant neglects these solutions and pursues a dialectical
path. On this point see my “Philosophy and Rhetoric in Kant’s Th ird Antinomy,”
Political Science Reviewer 30 (2001): 7–33.
15. For an extended discussion of Kant’s reception and critique in the next generation
of German thinkers, see Frederick C. Beiser, Th e Fate of Reason: German Philosophy
from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).
16. On this register their thought thus seems to be philosophic rather than theological,
as Strauss and others argue. Or to put it in other words, their thought is not
theological in the way scholastic and Reformation thought was. At a diff erent
level, however, their understanding of nature was itself fundamentally theological
in the broader sense we discussed above.
17. On this point see my “Descartes and the Question of Toleration,” in Early Modern
Skepticism and the Origins of Toleration, ed. Alan Levine (Lanthan, Md.: Rowman
and Littlefi eld, 1999).
18. Richard Tuck, “Hobbes and Descartes,” in Perspectives on Th omas Hobbes, ed. G.
A. J. Rogers and Alan Ryan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 15–30.
19. Th e manner of presentation on both sides of this debate was shaped in some measure
by the interlocutors’ sense of the external audiences of the work. Descartes,
whose position on human freedom was akin to that of the Arminians, had to walk
a careful line between his Catholic audience in France and his Calvinist audience
in Holland. Hobbes, whose position on freedom placed him nearer the Calvinists
and in opposition to the Catholics and the Arminians, was in an even more diffi -
cult position since he was living in exile in Catholic France, among the Arminians
and Catholics of the court, and with royalist sympathies that put him at odds with
the confessionally similar Calvinists in England.
20. Descartes almost certainly was relieved to avoid an explicit debate about his claim
that God was a deceiver since it put him most seriously at odds with the Catholic
Church.
21. AT 7:57; CSM 2:40 (for abbreviations, see chap. 1, n. 58).
22. Replies, AT 7:367–68; CSM 2:253.