by Rex Butler
Ian Hunter is an emeritus professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is an intellectual historian who has published various studies in the history of philosophical, political, legal, and theological thought. These studies treat thought as a concrete activity that is carried out within historical time through “arts and methods” and anchored in various “intellectual personae.” His first major work of this kind was Rival Enlightenments, published by Cambridge University Press in 2001. His most recent work and the topic of the present discussion is The Kantian Religion, an historical account of Kantianism as a philosophical religion published by Princeton University Press in 2026. For the JHI Blog, he discussed his latest work with Rex Butler, a Professor of Art History in the Faculty of Art Design and Architecture at Monash University who writes on critical theory and Australian art.
Rex Butler: Could you briefly tell us what your new book, The Kantian Religion, is about and where it stands in relation to existing Kant scholarship?
Ian Hunter: My book offers an account of Kantian philosophy as a purely historical phenomenon. Most modern Kant commentary is ahistorical. It reads him in accordance with either the canons of analytic philosophy or modern models of philosophical reason, such as those advanced by John Rawls and his students. This tends to wash away Kant’s metaphysical constructions and to view him anachronistically, as if he were a professor in a modern Ivy League philosophy department.
That said, there have been many historical studies of Kantian philosophy. Most of them, though, assume one of two forms, neither of which I found conducive to the investigation that I wanted to undertake. In one of these historiographies, Kantian philosophy is depicted as stepping into history to solve an impasse between “rationalism” and “empiricism,” namely through his discovery of the transcendental conditions of experience. The problem with this model is that it was invented by Kant himself to justify his philosophy and it interpolates a metaphysical doctrine—namely, that “rationalism” and “empiricism” falsely claim knowledge of “things in themselves”—into the conditions of historical inquiry.
The second model has a more Hegelian character, in that it treats Kantian philosophy as called into history to reconcile or mediate, albeit with only partial success, a series of fundamental oppositions. Here, it is argued that Kantianism emerged as an attempt to mediate such oppositions as those between understanding and sensibility, noumenal ideas and phenomenal appearances, and ideal morality and social reality. The problem with this model is that it characterizes Kant as subject to some kind of historical dialectic emergent from these oppositions, even though it was Kant who formulated these oppositions in the first place. A careful reading of Kant’s texts convinced me that these oppositions could be more fruitfully approached in another way: namely, as forming an ascetic device through which Kantian philosophers attend to and act on themselves in pursuit of certain kinds of intellectual transformation.
RB: Could you say a little more about this? After all, many modern readers might not be prepared to view philosophical arguments as ways of acting on the self. Equally, many might find it odd to treat the history of philosophy as a history of such practices of self-transformation.
IH: What you say is true, but it applies only to modern philosophy and its historiography. The humanist historiography that emerged during the Renaissance distinguished itself from scholastic philosophy and theology by treating thought in these domains as concrete “intellectual activities,” rather than in terms of transcendental insight into divine or human ideas. Modern histories of philosophies that treat them as concrete ways of attending to and acting on the self are direct extensions of this style of humanist historiography. Humanist historiography has thus shown that the Epicureans and Stoics undertook philosophical reading and exercises in order to moderate destructive emotions such as grief, anger, or jealousy, or to govern the dangerous passions of greed, ambition, and lust; just as members of the Platonic schools undertook exercises in withdrawing from sensory experience and contemplation of the “forms” in order to achieve insight into transcendental concepts and principles.
By investigating Kantian philosophy as an ascesis—that is, in terms of concrete acts of self-attention and self-transformation—The Kantian Religion is situated within the humanist historiography of philosophy. If this approach seems unusual, that is because, barring a few rare exceptions, it has not been taken to Kantian philosophy. It thus departs from the standard approach in which Kant’s philosophy is treated as an exposition of a priori, universal principles of cognition and morality retrieved from the mind through transcendental reflection on behalf of humanity. Charting a different course, the book investigates Kantian philosophy as a body of historical doctrines, arguments, and spiritual exercises. I argued that since the late eighteenth century, these have provided a tiny, highly educated elite with the ascetic means of attending to and transforming themselves. The aim of this “philosophical ascesis” is the crafting of the higher self of the Kantian philosopher.
RB: Could you start us off with some examples?
IH: The book discusses transcendental self-reflection and contemplation of the idea of the moral law as paradigmatic instances of these spiritual or ascetic exercises. Through them, Kantian philosophers are supposed to obtain insight into the transcendental conditions of experience and to acquire the capacity to govern their desires by thinking the idea of the moral law. Treating these doctrines, usually discussed as philosophical ideas or arguments, as acts that the philosophical acolyte must perform upon themselves is the first and crucial step in approaching Kantian philosophy as a historical form of philosophical ascesis. But it immediately prompts a series of further questions: From what historical sources did Kant derive the doctrines, devices, and exercises of this philosophical ascesis? In what institutional circumstances did he assemble the ascesis and to what end? What was the relation between this Kantian ascesis and the spiritual practices and observances of the Christian churches? And what was the relation between Kantian transcendental reflection and the humanist and natural sciences flourishing at the same time, considering that they seemed to have had no use for such reflection or for the higher self of the Kantian philosopher?
RB: So, the point of the book is to treat Kantian philosophy as a historical phenomenon by approaching it as an ascesis, or as a body of doctrines and exercises for cultivating a higher form of self, and then to discuss the religious reception and cultural impact of this ascesis. Why, though, do you characterize Kantianism as a kind of religion? To what extent is your use of this term similar to Foucault’s concept of “spirituality,” for example, or to Carlos Fraenkel’s notion of “philosophical religion” or to Pierre Hadot’s theme of “philosophy as a way of life”?
IH: I had already drawn on Foucault’s discussion of spirituality and its relation to philosophy in earlier works. Foucault treats spirituality as the carrying out of certain “acts of the self on the self” that are designed to shape a subject capable of higher forms of insight, including philosophical insight. This was an approach that he shared with his one-time Berkeley colleague, the historian of late antiquity Peter Brown, from whose studies of philosophical asceticism I have also learned so much. Fraenkel’s and Hadot’s work has been less important for my investigations, since the former thinks that Neoplatonic philosophy functions as a true religion, while the latter argues that ancient philosophy’s role as a way of life was transferred to Christianity, leaving modern philosophy to emerge as an abstract method. In characterizing Kantianism as a philosophical religion, my aim is more straightforwardly historical: to delineate a series of features that permit the empirical question of its religious disposition to be posed.
RB: Won’t there be some readers, though, for whom characterizing Kantianism as a kind of religion will sound like academic attention-seeking rather than sober scholarship?
IH: That’s almost certainly true, but I would urge such readers to consider the four features that the book presents as allowing us to approach Kantianism as a kind of philosophical religion. First, it can be observed that in claiming to supply its adherents with capacities for transcendental self-clarification and moral self-regeneration, Kantianism was laying claim to a spiritual role that had hitherto been the monopoly of the Christian churches. This is why Kantian philosophy was characterized as a philosophical religion by many of its early adherents and opponents alike.
Second, I argue that Kant assembled the core architecture of his philosophy through a brilliant repurposing of key Christian figures of thought and spiritual practices. Centrally, he borrowed the model of the person as a double-natured sensible and rational being from the Christology of the double-natured (divine and human) Christ. He then superimposed on this the Platonic model of archetypal and ectypal (suprasensible and sensible) being, thereby constructing a powerful device through which philosophers could attend to and reshape themselves in the image of a higher archetypal intellect.
Third, in identifying his elite exercises in transcendental self-clarification and moral self-regeneration with (philosophical) “reason,” Kant sought to exercise cultural-political hegemony over “positive” Christianity as well as the historical and natural sciences. This identification meant that biblical-ecclesiastical religion could only characterized as the “historical vehicle” or symbol for a form of timeless philosophical holiness. It also meant that, in claiming knowledge of the historical and empirical world, the historical and natural sciences were only dealing with empirical appearances, whose transcendental conditions Kant declared to be the province of philosophical reason alone.
Finally, this emboldened Kant to propound his own philosophical religion, which he called the pure moral religion and the pure religion of reason. He located this in the capacity of “pure practical reason” to govern the will purely through philosophical contemplation of the moral law—that is, in the Kantian moral ascesis. Ultimately, this committed Kant to the eschatological prophecy that in the present period of Enlightenment, this religion of pure reason was in the process of supplanting all biblical-ecclesiastical faiths and extinguishing Judaism altogether.
RB: In the book, you argue that as a body of positive doctrines and strenuous arguments functioning as ascetic exercises, Kantian philosophy is a concrete historical activity. An important corollary of this historical approach is that the question of truth is entirely bracketed. No longer approaching Kant’s philosophy as a set of propositional arguments whose truth or falsity the philosopher may judge, you look instead to the use to which various kinds of argument and doctrines were put in attending to and acting on the self. But in bracketing truth, aren’t we in danger of undermining the work of philosophy? After all, would anyone be prepared to undertake this work on the self without the promise, or even the illusion, of some “truth” to be obtained at the end of it? The worry, it seems to me, is that the approach you adopt here leaves us with a picture in which all intellectual inquiry is reduced to practices of self-fashioning. But even your inquiry, and some of the self-fashioning that writing this book undoubtedly involved, must have been motivated by the possibility of saying something true.
IH: I accept the thrust of this comment, but would seek to alter the terms of its understanding. It all depends on what kind of truth one is talking about. There are two kinds of truth in Kant’s philosophy. In his theoretical philosophy, truth is equated with the philosophical necessity of having to accept the outcome of transcendental arguments. In Kant’s moral philosophy, by contrast, truth assumes a quite different form. Here, the truth of the moral law comes from its sublimity as an archetype, the beholding of which transforms the beholder, allowing them to participate in something holy. Neither of these senses of truth are the singular outcome of valid propositional arguments. Rather they refer to two distinct but associated ways in which philosophers shape a self that is spiritually qualified to accede to truth.
My approach differs from the Kantian one markedly. In keeping with the humanist historiographical models that inform and inspire The Kantian Religion, I am not aiming for truth as a condition or judgment arrived at through logical or moral necessity. Rather, I am attempting to achieve an intellectual comportment no less difficult and strenuous: impartiality and objectivity. My late friend and colleague Stephen Gaukroger argued that a revolution occurred in early modern natural science at precisely the moment when the goal of truth was abandoned in favour of objectivity or impartiality. Unlike philosophical truth, which claims to be absolute, necessary, or apodictic, humanist impartiality and objectivity are matters of degree. A commitment to impartiality and objectivity denotes less a pursuit of some conclusive result than a way of conducting the intellect that is oriented to the fallibilistic investigation of evidentiary sources, typically in written records. Such an endeavour is permanently open to falsification and modification; its results are never more than probable and provisional.
It is in this humanist spirit that I, for example, put forward my argument that Kant’s model of the person, as possessed of the faculties of sensibility and understanding, was derived from the Christological doctrine of the double-natured human and divine Christ. I then show that this model serves twin ascetic roles. First, it is used to incite apprentice philosophers to relate to themselves as swept by chaotic sensible impressions and thereby compelled to seek the transcendental conditions of intelligibility within their own minds. Second, it awakens them to the fear that their will has been corrupted by “sensuous inclinations,” thereby impelling them to seek to govern their desires by contemplating the idea or archetype of the moral law. To support these arguments, the book assembles various kinds of textual and contextual evidence, drawing on Kant’s published texts and unpublished notebooks and letters. It also cites extensively from works by Kant’s early followers, all of whom appear to use the model of double-natured man to attend to and shape themselves in the manner just described. My arguments are thus eminently refutable based on the assembled evidence.
Conversely, there is no way of refuting Kant’s argument for the necessary truth of the moral law, since it relies on the teaching that you cannot obtain a holy will without contemplating the idea of the law. Similarly, once someone accepts that sensibility delivers only a “scatter” of sensible impressions, then they must accept the necessity of the a priori categories and forms of intuition as the condition of intelligibility of the sensible impressions. This comparison leads us to suspect that Kantian philosophical truth and humanist historiographical objectivity belong in different intellectual worlds or constitute incommensurable ways of intellectual life.
RB: If Kantian philosophy and humanist historiography really are two such opposed intellectual cultures or ways of intellectual life, why should one be preferred over the other?
IH: Your question is an invitation to engage in meta-philosophy; that is, to seek principles for justifying the choice between different disciplinary cultures, as if these cultures were themselves grounded in philosophical principles or theories and hence amenable to a higher-order philosophical adjudication. If, however, Kantianism is not grounded in rational principles but in ways of attending to and acting on the intellectual self, then it cannot be open to meta-philosophical judgment. That is because adherence to its principles reflects an existential decision to engage in a certain practice of self-transformation or way of intellectual life. In Kant’s moral philosophy, for example, its central principle—that one should govern oneself through rational contemplation of the idea of the moral law to the exclusion of all “external” goods and desires—is an elevated spiritual condition to which adepts aspire by engaging in this kind of philosophical ascesis. Rather than a philosophical principle, this exercise is grounded in an ascetic device, namely in the thought-figure of double-natured man, through which apprentices come to worry that their “reason” might be overwhelmed by “sensuous inclinations” arising from their “sensibility.”
Kant stated emphatically that this model of double-natured man could not be rationally justified because all thinking takes place within it. Considering that the absolute idealists would soon propose a model of single-natured man—as “absolute I” or Geist—Kant’s refusal of rational justification indicates that he was presenting his model as something requiring immediate existential acceptance, as would the absolute idealists their model. From this it would appear then that one enters this kind of intellectual life through inculcation, conversion, and existential decision. Rather than being governed by rational principles, these acts or moments occur in the unpredictable and philosophically ungrounded realm of biographical and pedagogical life circumstances. Initially, it was only young men from pious families, training to be Lutheran clergy and teachers in socially exclusive academic institutions, who could choose to configure themselves as double-natured sensible and rational beings, in pursuit of the higher self of the Kantian philosopher. If the decision to become a Kantian philosopher was driven by the pursuit of a spiritual vocation for which family and religious life had prepared them, then we can begin to see why the question of why one disciplinary culture should be preferred over another might be unhelpful when posed in meta-philosophical terms. If disciplinary cultures are rationally ungrounded ways of life, driven by internal aspirational ideals, then, rather than presuming the relations among them to be normatively governed by reason or philosophical principle, we should approach such relations empirically.
This means allowing for the possibility that these relations might be characterized by irreconcilable conflicts and rivalries, institutional culture wars, impasses and stalemates, or even forks in the road where cultures diverge, ceasing to interact with each other altogether. In the case of idealist philosophy and the mathematical-experimental natural sciences, for example, the relation is more like that of a fork in the cultural road. For even though Kant, Schelling, and Hegel attempted to include mechanics, dynamics, and electromagnetism as branches of metaphysics and logic, scientists like Leonhard Euler could ignore such attempts with impunity. As Dmitri Levitin has shown, as a result of their radical reconfiguration through medical empiricism and “mixed mathematics,” during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the physical sciences came to abjure all concern with philosophical essences, substances and forms, allowing mathematical physicists to cease engaging with philosophers altogether.
In the case of idealist philosophy and the humanist or historiographical sciences, however, the character of their relationship would lead not to a divorce settlement but to permanent conflict and wrangling. Here, there was no equivalent to the advanced mathematical techniques used in the physical sciences that removed objects of knowledge from philosophical understanding, and nothing comparable to the technical mastery of nature that issued from these sciences. Since idealist philosophy and humanist historiography both interpreted texts and did so within universities shaped by the post-1648 German ecclesiastical and constitutional settlement, there was no technical-methodological path that might permit a clean break between them. In fact, this entanglement had been wound tighter by Kant’s improvisation of a philosophical biblical hermeneutics and a philosophical history of religion in his Religion book of 1793. Not only did this mean that philosophical hermeneutics and humanist historiography appear to be talking about the same texts—initially the Bible—it also meant that the former adopted a posture of permanent critique in relation to the latter. For, from the philosophical hermeneutic perspective, to treat the Bible as a purely historical-philological phenomenon was to fail to retrieve the timeless transcendental reason that was symbolically expressed in it.
This entanglement of fundamentally different ways of approaching religious, juridical and political phenomena meant that conflicts between philosophical hermeneutics and humanist historiography were settled neither by rational argument nor amicable divorce. They were prosecuted instead through ad personam attacks, academic culture wars, sectarian skewing of academic appointments and prizes, and publication gatekeeping, just like today. As shown in a classic study, this is how the conflict between Hegelian philosophers and Rankean historians played out at Berlin University during the first decades of the nineteenth century. The Hegelians attacked the Rankeans for lacking a hermeneutic capable of discerning the progressive unfolding of reason or spirit in history, while the Rankeans turned their backs on the Hegelians for using a hermeneutic that dissolved ecclesiastical and constitutional history into philosophy. The still-unresolved character of this existential conflict is demonstrated by those modern studies that view it in purely Hegelian terms: as a failure to achieve a dialectical reconciliation between rationalist idealism and positivist empiricism that would resolve the difference between the Hegelians and Rankeans.
RB: You characterize your approach to Kantian philosophy as descriptive and historical, but isn’t there something “ironic,” perhaps even debunking, going on? After all, Kant claims to have discovered timeless a priori truths through a universal exercise in transcendental self-reflection, which you then treat as a purely historical exercise carried out by a small elite of “spiritual athletes.” Considering this apparently genealogical strategy, what other intellectual projects would you align with yours? There is Foucault, obviously, but we might also think of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which historicizes religions, or Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals, which relativizes morality.
IH: It’s a good, properly challenging question. In his Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, Wittgenstein argues that in treating “primitive” rituals and symbols as attempts to achieve the results of modern science through magic, Frazer explains them away, rather than describing the way these rituals and symbols work within a way of life. Wittgenstein adopts a similar approach to problems in modern philosophy, offering a therapeutic description of how they arise rather than a theoretical critique of them. The purpose of therapeutic description, he says, is not to solve philosophical problems but to enable us to stop worrying about them. This is what I seek to do by investigating Kant’s transcendental deduction and antinomies of reason as devices for attending to and acting on the philosophical self. Approaching them as what Peter Brown would call “solemn rites of the mind,” my aim is not to explain away or subject Kant’s deduction or antinomies to theoretical critique. It is rather to describe the way his arguments and concepts operated within a way of academic intellectual life and to show how they were used to craft the formidable self of the Kantian philosopher, thus allowing us to view this figure with a certain historical detachment.
Such detachment does not preclude, and perhaps even necessitates, an appreciation of the spiritual aspiration and emotional exhilaration associated with the intense desire to craft a higher form of self. The goal each of these young spiritual athletes held before them was the formidable and coveted self of the Kantian philosopher who aspires to retrieve the transcendental conditions of experience from their own mind and to determine their own will purely by beholding the sublime archetype of the moral law, foregoing all desire for happiness. A truly historical picture of Kantianism is incomplete if it does not capture the affective and existential dimension.
But if we must appreciate the emotional dimension, the historian nevertheless cannot share in it and therein lies the therapeutic nature of such historical description. For the philological and contextualizing methods used by the intellectual historian mean that the objects thus described, including a priori and transcendental thought, are treated as concrete acts and exercises occurring in historical time. Such an approach entails accepting that access to Kantian transcendental categories and moral principles is restricted to an educated academic elite trained in strenuous spiritual exercises. Such description would also seem to deprive the ascesis of the motivating emotional incitement promised by the beholding of transcendental ideas and sublime archetypes, since these are now viewed philologically and contextually, in terms of their source doctrines and exercises. But if such emotional cooling is the effect of the humanist’s historical labor, it in no way undermines the neutrality or impartiality of their descriptions. As with early modern biblical philology, impartiality cannot be reduced to an ideological aim. It arises rather from a method that detaches the object—Kantian philosophy, the Bible—from transcendent truth and allows it to be investigated as the record of human activity and historical circumstance. This radical change of perspective can indeed be confronting for those for whom the relevant texts serve as portals to a higher spiritual self, and the consequence may indeed be that of debunking or undermining the reverence others may show to the object, but such culture shock is a byproduct of impartial scholarship, not its purpose.
RB: Which other writers and works have served you as models for this kind of approach?
IH: Rather than laying claim to the famous genealogists, I would align my contribution with the work of the philological giants on whose shoulders The Kantian Religion stands: such figures as J.G.A. Pocock, Peter Brown, Anthony Grafton and, more recently, Dmitri Levitin. As they have taught us, however, their work in turn draws upon the extraordinary work of such early-modern philologists as Scaliger, Casaubon, Leclerc, Simon, Beausobre, Arnold, and Mosheim. These érudits were among the first to adapt the methods of classical textual criticism and contextual history to the study of the Bible and the history of Christian theology, philosophy, and church. As I have argued previously, this meant that books, intellectual traditions, and ecclesial institutions formerly regarded as sacred and transcendent were recast as the products of human hands and motives, situated in purely historical circumstances.
An important modern source of this kind of contextual historiography is to be found in the work of the so-called Cambridge School. In focusing not on the transhistorical meaning of words but on what is done with them in language-games of various kinds, Pocock and Quentin Skinner investigated the historical circumstances or contexts that determined such uses. In doing so, they inherited the central thrust of post-Renaissance humanist historiography, which can be seen most clearly in their histories of this historiography, for example, the fifth volume of Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion. Despite showing how philosophical history could thus be supplanted by the history of historiography, Pocock and Skinner themselves did not apply this approach to the history of modern philosophy or to German idealism, in which they had no particular interest. When I first began to chance my hand at this, making use of Foucault’s conception of ethics as a “work of the self on the self,” it became clear that this approach would radically transform the transcendentalist and universalist claims of German idealism. It would allow this philosophy to be investigated in terms of the ascetic work performed by transcendental argument and reflection, and the religious and cultural-political purposes served by this work, as I have sketched this in my earlier answers. This would in turn illuminate the fork in the road between idealist philosophy and humanist historiography, which I first attempted to investigate in a work whose title advertises this parting of the ways: Rival Enlightenments.
RB: How then do you locate your own work in relation to this cultural fissure?
IH: In situating itself at this fork in the road of the modern humanities, The Kantian Religion seeks to provide a philological or contextual history of Kantian philosophy that cannot be assimilated to philosophical history and hermeneutics. It is only through cultivation of the philological disciplines and ethos that Kantian philosophy can be approached as an object of empirical historical investigation—the Kantian ascesis—situated in an evidential textual and contextual field. The payoff for this methodological stringency is a fresh look at what Kantian philosophy does and what has been done with it. If we treat Kant’s model of double-natured sensible and rational man not just as a theoretical posit but as an ascetic device for attending to and acting on the self, then new prospects open for our exploration. This permits us to see into the circumstances in which young seminarians and university students learned to view themselves as swept by rhapsodic sensations and distracting desires, both arising from the sensibility. And this in turn provides insight into the intensity with which they sought respite from epistemological chaos through transcendental reflection and control over unruly desires through contemplation of the moral law. From this we can begin to see why Lutheran and Catholic academic theologians responded to Kantian philosophy as a rival spiritual practice that gripped their students’ souls and had to be treated as a formidable theological threat. In short, far from reducing it to something alien, approaching Kantianism as a philosophical ascesis allows us a more intimate insight into what makes it so attractive to those who have found themselves through it and so problematic for custodians of other ways of spiritual and intellectual life.
Edited by Daniel Badenhorst.
Featured image: Kupferstich von dem Grab Kants, line engraving by O. Weinberg, 1873.