The Task and System of Philosophy

The Task of Philosophy

Philosophy and Religion

The relationship between philosophy and religion is subject to change in accordance with the evolving historical conditions. However, this relationship has always exhibited a dual nature; it can be either friendly or hostile, giving rise to a struggle within worldviews that has caused discord in philosophy from its inception. Thus, the history of philosophy serves not merely as a mirror reflecting scientific development, but primarily as a battleground for the religious convictions that have stirred humanity at various times. By transferring this struggle into the realm of scientific inquiry, philosophy assumes an important cultural mission: to instill scientific perspectives within religious contexts. In this way, science participates in the evolution of religious worldviews largely through philosophy. Consequently, the relationship between philosophy and religion encompasses various aspects that, while changing over time, significantly influence the character of philosophy itself.

In Greek philosophy, the opposition to the polytheism of popular religion emerges as a distinctive characteristic, often surpassing the scientific aspirations of philosophers. From early on, philosophy stands as a champion of monotheistic perspectives. In the teachings of Plato and Aristotle, this struggle reaches its pinnacle, where it intertwines the religious and scientific worldviews into a unity, aiming for the ultimate principles of scientific understanding to also serve as the foundation for religious thought. This aspiration evolves in subsequent stages of Greek philosophy, particularly among the Stoics and Epicureans, where, partly due to the decline of popular religion, the emphasis shifts from merely reforming religious beliefs to replacing them with philosophy. Yet, this shift does not significantly alter the one-sided nature of the relationship; philosophy continues to exert its influence on religion rather than vice versa. It is only during the decline of ancient philosophy, influenced by the nascent Christian religious ideas that liberated forces opposing pagan philosophy, that the situation begins to change: gradually, religion starts to acquire a dominant role, and philosophy becomes its servant. Even the proponents of ancient philosophy, who sought to counter the rising Christian worldview by restoring the ancient belief in the gods and fortifying it through philosophical and symbolic interpretations, were swept up in the same movement that marked the emerging Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages.

In this lengthy second period, the relationship between philosophy and religion reverses the dynamic that existed during the flourishing of ancient philosophy: religious worldview entirely subjugates philosophy. Although philosophy and the concepts it developed in ancient times could influence the evolution of dogmas, it found itself, as the servant of theology, directed by unchanging Christian beliefs; it merely provided these beliefs with a particular scientific formulation. This relationship initially did not provoke disagreements; only the question of how philosophy could serve as an auxiliary science to religion stirred contention. Gradually, however, this disagreement morphed into a conflict of opinions that played a crucial role in the ultimate liberation of philosophy from the dominion of theology. The question that introduced discord into the scholarly world at the end of the Middle Ages was whether philosophy could serve faith at all, or if faith should remain self-enclosed, and whether philosophy could, at least, provide a complete understanding of the sensory world. Even during the decline of medieval philosophy, the attention of philosophers increasingly gravitated towards resolving the latter alternative, ensuring the free status philosophy has occupied since the dawn of modernity.

However, this does not definitively establish the relationship between religion and philosophy. As modern philosophy is influenced by all past philosophical currents, the struggle between worldviews takes on a more intense character than before. Greater freedom in philosophical thought expands the arena of contention. Initially, in connection with the separation of the domains of philosophy and religion achieved at the end of the Middle Ages, a perspective emerged wherein philosophy encompasses the entirety of secular knowledge, while religion serves as the norm to which science should adhere. Philosophy, therefore, is pure science. Nevertheless, since faith holds greater value than knowledge, in all questionable instances, philosophy must yield to dogma. This subordination, however, often proves to be a conditional formulation, primarily in Catholic countries, devised to prevent potential opposition from the Church against proposed doctrines. From this context, during the Enlightenment, an understanding gradually develops that stands in stark contrast to the original: it is not philosophy that must submit to the control of dogma, but rather that dogma must be subjected to philosophical inquiry. Thus arises the demand for a religion of pure reason that should replace the positive, traditional religion, aspiring to possess a universal rather than a particular character—essentially, to represent a universally significant system of belief akin to how philosophy, viewed as a science, claims to be a universally significant system of knowledge. Furthermore, within the philosophical system, religion is subordinated to science, suggesting that the content of faith can only encompass what also constitutes an object of knowledge. In the most extreme philosophical systems of this period, the distinction between religious and scientific worldviews is altogether dismissed; ultimately, the content of faith is reduced to a defined set of scientific laws concerning the foundations of existence, derived either empirically or speculatively.

However, this understanding undergoes a significant transformation in the period of modern philosophy following the Enlightenment, primarily associated with the name of Kant. Kant demonstrated that religious worldviews rest not on concepts that could be delineated by known logical and empirical criteria, as scientific concepts can be, but on transcendental presuppositions that can never constitute the content of pure science, instead relying directly on certain boundary concepts that remain inaccessible to scientific cognition, thus holding regulatory significance for it. Consequently, religion and philosophy become distinct and independent domains, each complementing the other only to the extent that the sensory world presupposes the supersensory. This is further revealed by the fact that scientific problems ultimately lead to transcendental questions concerning the ultimate foundation and purpose of things—questions that are posed by science but cannot be resolved by it.

From this relationship, it primarily follows that philosophy and religion must mutually acknowledge their independence and the distinct nature of their respective tasks. Consequently, the further development of the new philosophy, which finds its starting point in Kant, is directed in sharp opposition to the philosophy of the preceding era, although, of course, a return to the tendencies of the past is often observed up to the present time. Philosophy, like any other science, deals with the empirical sensory world, which is the only object of our knowledge: philosophy neither wishes nor can be anything other than the final link in the chain of theoretical sciences. The subject of religion, on the other hand, pertains to the supersensory realm, which, although it may be an object of human desires and hopes, remains inaccessible to theoretical knowledge. Nevertheless, the empirical sensory world inevitably points towards it: the quest to find the foundation and purpose of things does not halt where our knowledge encounters definite boundaries, but, due to the unique nature of our reason, transcends those boundaries. Since both realms are entirely distinct in their content, philosophy can set no defined limits to religious worldviews, just as religion is neither authorized nor capable of intervening in the affairs of science, be it philosophy or any other specialized discipline. Therefore, just as religion is entirely unconcerned with questions such as whether the Earth moves in cosmic space, whether humans descended from apes, or whether psychological phenomena necessitate the assumption that the soul is a substance, so too does philosophy, from the aforementioned perspective, have nothing to do with how humans, in their religious needs, relate to the supersensory world that complements their sensory experience.

However, the relationship between religion and philosophy cannot be limited to a simple opposition. For the knowing and the believing, the philosophizing and the religious individual are not two distinct personalities that remain internally unrelated. In this regard, concerning knowledge and faith, the aspiration towards the unity of our reason must hold significance, as it does not tolerate contradictions between various branches of knowledge. Nineteenth-century philosophy attempted to satisfy this aspiration in two ways: it proposed two religious-philosophical systems that, as differing manifestations of the principle established by Kant—the mutual autonomy and independence of religion and philosophy—stand in contrast to the religious aspirations of the time, which sought to wholly replace religion with philosophy. The first attempt of this nature arose from the conception of the sensory and supersensory worlds as the objects of two distinct spiritual functions of humanity. The sensory world is the domain of reason, which regulates it according to its innate laws. The supersensory world is the domain of feeling, whose proper sphere is confined to the immediate understanding of the human relationship to the supersensory foundation of existence, manifesting in religion as a sense of dependence. The chief advocate of such a dualistic interpretation of Kantian thought is Schleiermacher. The second attempt arises from viewing religion and philosophy as necessary products of the human mind; neither philosophy nor religion possesses different content in themselves; they are merely different forms through which universal reason is revealed in each individual consciousness. One of these forms is symbolic, operating within feelings and representations: its organ is imagination, and its product is religion. The other is thought, developing logically: its organ is the thinking mind, and its product is philosophy. Thus, philosophy and religion share the same content, which they express only in different forms. The principal representative of this monistic interpretation of Kantian thought, which undoubtedly also embodies a significant transformation of it, is Hegel.

Although both of these attempts, in their endeavor to unite religion and philosophy in a higher unity, still find adherents even to this day, the prevailing currents in theology and philosophy have distanced themselves from them, returning to a more general and, of course, also more indeterminate understanding of Kant regarding the relationship between philosophy and religion. In this return to Kant, the development of modern theology plays a substantial role. In its quest to achieve a true science of religion, theology inevitably seeks to serve as a mediating link between philosophy and religion, just as in all other branches of scientific knowledge, a specialized science serves as a preparation for philosophical inquiry. Consequently, the object of the latter is not immediate experience but knowledge acquired through specialized sciences. Theology, on one hand, as a critical history of religious traditions and their literary sources, belongs to historical and philological disciplines. On the other hand, since it cannot detach itself from the knowledge of the psychological origins of religious ideas and their ethical significance, it closely intersects with psychology and ethics. In this context, philosophy relates to theology as it does to all specialized disciplines; it endeavors to unify the principles and methods it employs in understanding into a coherent system. Therefore, religion, much like the resolution of mathematical, physical, or historical problems, does not constitute the immediate content of philosophical inquiry; philosophy also engages with facts that have already undergone scientific treatment, which are presented to it by religious science—partly from a psychological and partly from a historical branch of knowledge. Thus, the philosophy of religion relates to positive religion in the same manner that the philosophy of law relates to positive law or aesthetics relates to the history of the arts. In all these cases, the subject of philosophy comprises material that has already been processed by specialized science; thus, when it pertains to any content of human life, the subject of philosophy is not the direct content itself but the result of its analysis. At the same time, the scientific results obtained from the study of religion constitute the subject of philosophy only in the sense that the latter, with its overarching tasks, engages precisely where scientific specialized investigation proves insufficient: concerning all specialized questions, philosophy emerges exactly where the results and methods of one specialized field closely intertwine with the results and methods of other fields and with the overarching problems of human knowledge.

If we now compare the relationship between philosophy and religion, as it has manifested in our historical overview of its development in accordance with the current stage of science in general and of religious inquiry in particular, to the relationship established by us that corresponds to the fundamental needs of contemporary science between philosophy and the entirety of other specialized sciences, we will see that there is no difference between them and that, consequently, the science of religion fully integrates into the corpus of other sciences. Philosophy can no more establish new religions than it can create positive law or achieve discoveries in the natural sciences or psychology. Its task here also consists in investigating the content of data already processed by specialized science and integrating them into the general system of our knowledge. This task is inherently theoretical, and only indirectly, through the influence of theoretical knowledge on the practical activity of individuals, does it become practical. Nevertheless, in the striving to influence practical activity, the foremost role belongs to specialized science, which, in this case, unites the practical inclination with the theoretical, namely theology, just as in the realm of law, the primary influence on positive law belongs to legal science, and only indirectly, through its mediation, to the philosophy of law.

Initially unequal, the relationships between philosophy and science, on the one hand, and philosophy and religion, on the other, gradually transform in accordance with changing cultural conditions, ultimately becoming identical: the relationship of philosophy to other sciences also encompasses its relationship to religion. Thus, the general definition of philosophy, as a "universal science," previously established, requires no supplementation to express its relationship to religion but merely clarification that the specialized sciences forming the foundation of philosophy must also include the science of religion in its entirety, provided that, at least, it is an independent theoretical science. This last qualification is always useful to append, for theology, like all scientific fields that stand in close relation to practical life—more so than any other specialized science—is simultaneously defined by practical aspirations, which often have little in common with scientific aims and frequently obstruct scientific inquiry.