Book contents
- Kant and Literary Studies
- Cambridge Studies in Literature and Philosophy
- Kant and Literary Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Kant on Literature
- Part II Kant, Literary Theory, and the Critical Formation of the “Human” Disciplines
- Chapter 4 “A New Light Broke upon the First Person …”
- Chapter 5 Modern Being in the World
- Chapter 6 Voice Enjoined
- Chapter 7 Narrative Discontinuity
- Part III Kant and Literature
- Index
- References
Chapter 7 - Narrative Discontinuity
Kant’s History of Religion(s)
from Part II - Kant, Literary Theory, and the Critical Formation of the “Human” Disciplines
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 May 2025
Edited by
Book contents
- Kant and Literary Studies
- Cambridge Studies in Literature and Philosophy
- Kant and Literary Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Kant on Literature
- Part II Kant, Literary Theory, and the Critical Formation of the “Human” Disciplines
- Chapter 4 “A New Light Broke upon the First Person …”
- Chapter 5 Modern Being in the World
- Chapter 6 Voice Enjoined
- Chapter 7 Narrative Discontinuity
- Part III Kant and Literature
- Index
- References
Summary
In Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant argues that Judaism and Christianity are both doctrinally and historically unrelated. This chapter investigates how the absolute doctrinal difference that Kant asserts between Judaism and Christianity seems to demand as its fabulated corollary a thoroughgoing historical discontinuity between them. In order to assert the doctrinal discontinuity between Judaism and Christianity, Kant famously argues that Judaism is not a religion at all, drawing on longstanding Christian tropes. That claim in its turn rests on an origin story of Judaism, that is, a proposed historical account of the “statutory” origins of Judaism. Having described Judaism in this fashion, Kant has a narrative problem in explaining how Christianity came into historical existence as something entirely new. Kant would like his historical and doctrinal analyses to accord with each other in representing an absolute break between Christianity and Judaism in both respects, but continuity reasserts itself indirectly in that narrative. What is more, Christianity and Judaism both come to be characterized by Kant as having passed through historical stages in which their most proper “principles” are not consistent with their various historical manifestations. What Kant describes as the essences of Judaism and Christianity turn out, in his account, not consistently to inhabit their historical formations, such that in each case their “germ” and their “principles” do not reliably coincide.
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- Kant and Literary Studies , pp. 169 - 186Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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