The main topic of my conference concerns the possibility to reinforce through
a religious faith the right to difference, which is actually a rational right,
recognized in and by a positive law. In other words, I try to understand the
way of a possible cooperation of faith and reason when both have the goal to
affirm theoretically and to defend practically the right to difference. Right
to difference consists of the liberal principle that a political community gives
anyone the way to look for his or her happiness. A system of laws, which should
be democratically approved, allows anyone to choose is way of life, that is
to realize his own project of life. The only condition (a typical liberal condition)
is that in the pursuing of own life goals everybody accepts not to hinder or
to disturb everybody else’s goals, which are different from each other,
but are also equal in their quality of free life goals. Liberal and democratic
societies should on the contrary implement the difference of their members and
help them to recognize that the reciprocal difference of their equal possibilities
to live, within the boundaries of a constitutional system of laws, in the free
pursuing of their goals, produces a growth of spiritual, cultural, social and
also economic wealth of the society. This possibility is a ‘right’
and this right is based on the respect of the different natural and spiritual
attitudes of the single men and women. This respect leaves, according to the
natural law tradition, to the idea that the difference between state of nature
and social, civil and political order consists in the transformation of what
is only a fact of nature (the difference of often conflicting human beings)
in a moral condition, that is in the transformation of the fact of liberty
in the value of liberty. This value does not contradict the fact of the
natural, free difference of the human beings, but gives a guarantee that the
free natural difference will be never destroyed by the simple, violent, superiority
of a man over any other. Nature becomes a value - and therefore is not anymore
nature, because it has been demonstrated that nature as such can not guarantee
freedom. Right and law consists in the recognition of a value. This recognition
is a human one, in the strict sense that is a rational one. Nature has become
reason, and only as such it remains important for the defence of the right to
difference.
Is there any place left for God, when the rational right has been affirmed as
the basis of the free living together of different human beings? This question
can not for theoretical reasons, and should not for moral reasons be answered
negatively. It should not even been rejected, as if the reason in which the
right consists of could allow us to deny the role of defence of the right to
difference that can be offered by the reign of the sacred, by an idea of God
to which even an unbeliever can approach. The goal becomes then for us to make
clear why we can introduce theoretical and moral motivations for assigning to
the right to difference the help of the God of the religion. There are two main
ways to answer the question. The first is to understand that even at
the eyes of an unbeliever the unicity of a monotheistic God is the condition
itself of the spirituality that any polytheistic notion of God does not have.
Unicity of God is the condition for being God the main agency of reciprocal
tolerance between human beings, just because God, the only and one God, is the
God of everybody, independently from any material, cultural, social, ethnical
and even religious difference. In his being the God of everybody, and therefore
in his being the only one and same God, worshipped with different names
by the different religions, God makes of the difference of human beings and
of their different worshipping God itself , a value to which is uniqueness is
dedicated and, more radically, which builds the basis of this uniqueness itself.
God is one because difference covers the world of the creatures who are His
creatures, and only the defence of this difference defends God itself from any
attack to his being the One. God is for the sake of difference of His creatures.
But this “for the sake of” has a double meaning. He is what He is
to guarantee the difference, the multiplicity of His creatures, but the contrary
also is true: that is, His creatures and their difference provide the essential
motivation for God being what He is. God is - thanks to His uniqueness, that
goes over the difference of the positive religions and that obliges to consider
as the greatest sin against God any form of political conflict based on religious
faith grounds - God of the difference in the essential double meaning
just remarked. He is for the difference just as much as difference
is for him.
This leaves us to meet and appreciate a surprising coherence and concordance
between the rational notion of right and the religious notion of a God, who
can and should now be accepted also by the unbelievers. The common referring
to difference is the main point of this convergence between faith and reason.
This is the point to be emphasized: the role plaid in the rational argument
that is now given, by the notion of difference between human beings. It is important
to understand that the difference as a fact is discovered to be essentially
as the difference as a value. It is also important to emphasize that
just because we consider the difference as the original basis of our argument,
that is just because we do not deduce it from anything else, we see
that both reason and faith, right and God, are related to difference, while
no confusion of their different nature occurs.
We could say that we are celebrating a sort of a ‘triumph of the difference’,
which reveals itself as the precondition of any unification, of any connection
in a common, and commonly accepted order. It is through the thought of the difference
of the human beings to be defended that we can say that between reason and faith
there is exactly the rational difference on which is grounded their cooperation.
It would be silly, in any case, do not admit that is reason, not faith that
has driven us to such surprising conclusions. This pushes us to a second
step, which is the demonstration by the way of the reasons of the morality,
and not anymore for the reasons of reason, that morality asks religion
to admit a notion of God as equivalent to the goodness of the moral rules themselves.
This is the way followed by Immanuel Kant in his 1793 Die Religion innerhalb
der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft. It is the moral law that obliges us to
think God as necessary and not vice versa. Different institutional and positive
religions should not therefore contrast with the freedom postulated by the moral
law, and should on the contrary help realizing the foundation of the “reign
of God on the earth”. This is possible, according to Kant, only by each
human being leaving the “ethical state of nature”, to become member
of an “ethical community”. We have seen that reason drives itself,
by its own means, to the admission of the oxymoron of the ‘equal priority’
of the rational right and of the God of the faith for what concerns their common
working for the difference. We see now that moral reason asks faith
to recognize in itself to be moral, that is to be moral just for the fact of
being an authentical faith and not a form of external, obliged obedience to
the laws of any church. Reason recognizes God, but requires God to recognize
its uniqueness and its spirituality (its living in the hearts of human beings)
as the features of its rationality.
There must be, according to Kant, a radical moral evil which drives us to not
corresponf to the law of our moral feature. The evil that we make derives not
from the limit of our nature, but from an original moral evil which realizes
the corruption that he himself has made of his good moral principle. This is
the reason why the evil is moral and has to charged on our freedom of choice.
Men and women have to make by themselves what they want to become: good or bad.
This is why when we assume the both these choices are the result of their “free
will”, we assume also that the moral evil can be refused and that men
can be corrected. As both good and evil must be charged to him and to his moral
responsibility, and are only for this reason moral choices, a bad man can improve
and become better and finally good, just because he wants this. His intention
must be a good one, if the divine judge in front of which he is going to present
himself, in the same moment and in the same way in which he presents himself
to his moral consciousness, can recognize that he has really become a new man.
The moral conversion is only represented in the figure of the Saver of the mankind.
He adopts the new moral intention “in all its purity” as the intention
of the Son of God, which is the real configuration of the pure moral intention.
For this reason, that is because the Son of God represents the purity of the
moral intention of everybody’s consciousness, he can be seen as guilty
of all the sins of humanity, as the one that dies for the faults of humanity
herself, and finally as the one who - lawyer of the humanity – can justify
it in front of the court of God, not different from the court of his moral consciousness.
It is easy to understand that we find here the way of the moral and rational
interpretation of the religion.This point is very important for us, because
in this theoretical field is rooted the important conflict between the will
of the moral consciousness, and the will of the clergy of any church, which
tries to convince us that the morality is the same as the obeying to the external
laws of every different church.
We will see at once that this apology of the moral consciousness constitutes
the conclusion of Kant’s book. Let us remark by now that it is exactly
when and only when we assume, against any form of clericalism, that our Gewissen,
that is our moral consciousness, that is the divine and the sacred in each
of us, can not and should not be guided, or directed, because the morality
rooted in Gewissen is always guide to itself, that we reach,
helped by Kant’s moral philosophy, the main goal for the defence, the
divine defence, of the difference between human beings. This happens
just because the supreme court to which we are supposed to submit our moral
features, our being good or bad, is this absolutely free individual consciousness,
that is the consciousness of each of us lighted by the divine light, which allows
it to be in its absolute singularity, the only judge of our intentions. The
idea of a moral consciousness of humanity does not mean that it exists in some
way a ultra-individual subject, whose morality is independent of the moral will
of each of us. It is just what the churches pretend from us: that we do not
recognize that “the moral principle of the religion is opposed to the
religious illusion” and that the “clerical regime” is the
“dominating power in the false adoration of the good principle”.
Making each singular consciousness the only moral judge prevent us from depending
in the moral and religious orientation in the world, in our big and little everyday’s
choices, from a false collective, institutional, conscience. This one conceals
to our eyes that “feticistical” feature of this presumed moral court,
and drives us to transform the absoluteness of our different consciousnesses,
equals each to each other only because each one can not become like
any other and is equal in its uniqueness, in the dependence from an official
faith that wants us to judge in the way the chiefs of any church have decided.
This would be the death at the same time of the moral consciousness and of the
difference between the human beings. But this would also mean the death of the
moral religion itself.
The real meaning of what Kants itself calls “Aufklärung”,
enlightenment, is to keep far from every risk that the moral choices becomes
institutional, expecially when this happens as the consequence of the reign
of a church. Churches destroy the autonomy of the singular moral consciousness
because the center of the moral decision is not any more in the absolute multiplicity
of the different individuals. A kind of “group moral and group faith”
takes the place of the moral singularities, each lighted by the light of the
real God. What Kant calls the “victory of the good principle over the
bad and the foundation of a reign of God on the earth”, can not be as
the substitution of another church to another, eventually more spiritual than
the first. What connects persons now become independent and therefore moral
is just the end of every church, and by this way the end of any conflict between
human beings which can derive from the lost of the divinity of the moral consciousness
in favour of different clergys worshipping different God. Those Gods could become
weapons of wars devastating first of all the liberty of each human being. Each
of these becomes the not any more different and autonomous soldier of a religious
army which fights against other religious armies, whose priests tell believers
what they must believe, which are the only moral truths, and which are the errors
of the false faiths that must be destroyed. Destruction of the moral consciousness
which is guide to itself, does not need to be proved and is the moral ground
of the difference in the whole of the humanity, destruction of the uniqueness
of the God which is the warranty of the divinity of each individual and his
free soul: these destructions go together and must therefore be fighted together.
Kant would probably disagree with this strongly liberal interpretation of his
thought. But there is no doubt that the risks that humanity faces today require
a radicalisation of his thought. To make appeal to the irreducible singularity
of the moral consciousness is the only way to oblige each person to be the first
and only judge of what is good and bad and of the way in which each person can
decide to be good or bad. The faith in a God, in the unique God under the many
different names, can only help us in finding the only possible way to pursue
the free unification of the mankind. But we have to assume that God is ‘God
of the difference’, and therefore of the moral unity of men and women.
This is why we have to listen to Kant when he reminds us that are not moral
human beings those who give the first place to the observance of institutional
laws, conceived as the way to make themselves welcome to God, and not as what
they are, the expression of the moral intention. What is “absolutely”
welcome to God is depending on the good behaviour, and is deeply different from
the “observance as something that can be only conditionally welcome to
God”. The divine worship becomes the mere fetishism of a false worship.
What is worst for us is that the false worshipping of God includes the wrong
and dangerous obedience to the orders of the false worshippers of a false God.
False God is any not rational God which is made the ‘spiritual property’
of any singular church. The true enlightenment is therefore in the “distinction”
in which all the most important things are at stake. God’s worship becomes
in the enlightenment free and therefore moral. This “liberty of the sons
of God” is lost when men are submitted to the yoke of a “statutary
law”, that obliges to believe in things that are true only historically,
not rationally. Consciousness , that is the moral Gewissen of each
moral being prevents us from believing what is only historically true, as imposed
by an external authority. Gewissen does not need any guide, as we have
said. Moral consciousness is sufficient to herself. It is the only Leitfaden
for all the doubts of the moral decisions, Kant says.
Can it be said in a clearer way that no superior authority can be admitted to
judge what Gewissen decides? And isn’t it clear that the hypothesis
itself of the existence of only one Gewissen for all the human beings,
that is the lost of the difference and of the multiplicity, would mean the end
of the morality itself, because the one Gewissen would become the only
external authority for all the others? It happens the same as in the notion
of God. Like God is the unique God of the difference, in the same way the moral
consciousness is the unique consciousness of the difference: the place where
difference gests its unity and identity, but still remaining a difference. Gewissen
is in itself a “duty” which does not need to be proved. If you doubt
that something is morally correct, you do not have to do it: like Plinius, quoted
by Kant, says “quod dubitas, ne feceris!”. It is not my intellect
that is supposed to decide from the outside if the action that I make
is or is not morally correct. This means again that there is not a general,
supraindividual, rule which helps us to decide what we have to do or to avoid.
Any moral judgement is every time my, his, her, everybody’s judgement.
It is at each time a different decision that is made when I (but also he, she)
not only judge or believe, but “am sure in my consciousness” that
I am going to behave well. The be sure is something individual and different
for each person, even if each one is equally sure. No one can take my place
when I feel sure that my action is right. All men can say the same, but no one
can take the place of anyone else. Moral consciousness is therefore the “faculty
of the moral judgement which judges itself”. This means – and is
our final main point where all the reasonings connect – that we dot not
simply decide of a fact being or not being submitted to a law, because our reason
is obliged to be the judge of her being or not being responsible to herself
in the judging of the rightness of its actions. This is the way by which we
can deny the moral right to kill a man owing to his personal (and supposed false)
religious faith, even in the case in which the law of God declare it possible
and necessary. “It is by consciousness sure that it is not right to kill
a man for his religious faith”. It is also possible that God may have
expressed this terrible will, but this is only historically demonstrated.
No one can by moral consciousness know if it is really true all what an historical
faith assumes: “If it is possible that is not right what a singular faith
wants or allows, it becomes a lack of consciousness the decision to obey”.
Any single man should decide not to violate “ a human duty, certain in
itself”.
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Tema