Kant, Hobbes, the State of Nature, and the Highest Good

Rousseau’s influence on Kant, concerning both moral and political philosophy, has been discussed in great detail in the literature. However, Kant’s debt to Hobbes has largely been neglected in the literature. Kant’s main treatment of the state of nature, in Part Three of Religion, is directly tied to Hobbes; it is Hobbes, and not Rousseau, that Kant mentions, while taking on Hobbes’ conception of the state of nature. The purpose of this paper is to examine Kant’s interaction with Hobbes in this formulation. My contention is that Kant dealt with Hobbes for specific reasons pertaining to the relationship between political and religious philosophy, especially concerning the issue of hope. Kant outlines his philosophy with a set of three questions. What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? The literature on Kant’s philosophy of religion is full of treatments of religion as the answer to Kant’s question of hope. There are also some references to Kant’s juxtaposition of hope to fear, especially in Kant’s earlier works. Though Kant does not continue to focus on this relationship between fear and hope in his later works, there is no indication that Kant changed his view. My position is that Kant no longer focused on this relation because he was more concerned with the issue of rational hope, rather than hope in general. Kant’s answer to hope, as outlined in the first Critique (and continued in the second and third Critiques) is the highest good. Kant later wrote that Religion provided the answer to hope, and, despite the sparsity of direct references to the highest good in Religion, there is no indication that Kant had changed his position. In my view, this issue is best seen in light of Kant’s discussion of the ethical state of nature Religion. Here, Kant’s focus is on Hobbes, for whom the state of nature is war of all against all in which freedom is state of everyone. However, this freedom does not provide a foundation for morality. Further, this state of freedom leads to fear of death at the hands of others who are also in this state. Hobbes’ solution to this is relinquishing freedom in order to obtain security. My contention is that these details of Hobbes’ view of the state of nature make sense both of Kant’s choice of Hobbes, rather than Rousseau, and of Kant’s answer to the question of hope in Religion. In the first section of this paper, I sketch Kant’s moral philosophy as it pertains to Rousseau. In the second section, I sketch Kant’s theory of religion, focusing on the issue of hope. In the third section, I outline Hobbes’ theory of the state of nature, focusing on the role of fear, in order to show how Kant took it on in his philosophy of religion. In the fourth section, I show how Kant’s choice of Hobbes’ state of nature, rather than Rousseau’s, fits with Kant’s project of answering the question of hope.