The Essence of Faith by Albert Schweitzer

Author:Albert Schweitzer [Schweitzer, Albert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Philosophical Library
Published: 2013-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

Let us survey once more by way of review the road we have travelled in the investigations thus far before we pass on to a comparison of the results of practical reason and the way in which they are realized with the results of that section of the Critique of Pure Reason dealing with the philosophy of religion with which we have already concerned ourselves.

At first, we saw how freedom relative to the moral judgment of our actions was presented, on the basis of the antinomy of the moral law, as imperative and experienced in the fact of conscience in that a sharp distinction was made between it and every empirical motive force for action. The structure was built with the material of critical idealism. The practical idea of freedom was realized according to the scheme of a philosophy of religion in the transcendental dialectic. In consequence of the thus necessitated borrowing of the method of investigation in that scheme, the problem of freedom was looked upon as apparently fully solved; with respect to the free rational being, a demand was made for the highest good presented as a synthetic unity of virtue and happiness. This is the formulation of the demands for a moral world in general, which is imperative, considering the isolated person. Asserting the impossibility of holiness on the one hand, and of happiness on the other, the empirically unfree rational being returns to investigate further. The demand for freedom in the face of the moral law in which the demand for a moral world in general is equally posited (which is immediately clear if we start with the community of all moral rational beings) reappears in the demand for a highest good which, in turn, is again only the demand of the individual for a moral world and leads to the postulates of immortality and the existence of God. Since the solution of the problem of freedom is not possible on the higher levels of stating the problem in the field of investigation of critical idealism, the realm of critical idealism is transcended in all statements at whose base we somehow find this problem. We have proven this for the section on the radically evil. Likewise, we found that the postulates regarding the formulation and statements did not stay within the bounds of critical idealism. They are “postulates” but not ideas. Only one idea is realized, the idea of freedom. In order to reach the triad and the systematic connection by which they could legitimatize themselves as ideas (cf. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 385), the three magnitudes realized thus far quit the series and the connection in which they had stood up to now and in which they had been realized. They immediately adopt the sequence and systematic connection which the three ideas in the process of entering the practical field exhibited on p. 385 of the Critique of Pure Reason. This procedure, however, is possible because the two postulates are not ideas. At their base lies the higher problem of freedom, which is beyond critical idealism.

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