Kant, Dühring and Nietzsche on Christianity and Judaism

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is known today mainly for his three disquisitions on the limits of reason as an instrument of epistemology, ethics and aesthetics (Critique of Reason, 1781/1787, Critique of Practical Reason, 1788, and Critique of the Faculty of Judgement, 1790) and for his strengthening of metaphysics in an age that had come to be dominated by Cartesian Rationalism. In politics, Kant favoured a republican, constitutional government which was based on moral foundations rather than on the majority rule of direct democracy. He believed that international relations too should be directed by the ideal of a universal federation of free states. The universal religion he envisaged for this federation would be a form of Christianity, since he believed that only Christianity was a truly moral religion and contained ‘the seed and the principles of the objective unity of the true and universal religious faith.’ His principal work on religion, Religion within the Limits of Reason, was published in 1793, that is, after his three critiques, and was followed by his essay on international politics, On Perpetual Peace (1795).

It is in his Religion within the Limits of Reason that Kant feels obliged to evaluate Judaism as the historical basis of Christianity. The first two books of this work are devoted to a discussion of the conflict of good and evil in human nature. The Third Book deals with the need to defeat the evil principle and to establish a ‘kingdom of God on earth’. Already in the ‘General Observations’ on Book I of this work Kant distinguishes two types of religions:

All religions, however, can be divided into those which are endeavors to win favor (mere worship) and moral religions, i.e., religions of good life-conduct. In the first, man flatters himself by believing either that God can make him eternally happy (through remission of his sins) without his having to become a better man, or else, if this seems to him impossible, that God can certainly make him a better man without his having to do anything more than to ask for it.[1]

Of the prevalent major religions Kant considers Christianity alone as being a moral religion:

In the moral religion (and of all the public religions which have ever existed, the Christian alone is moral) it is a basic principle that each must do as much as lies in his power to become a better man, and that only when he has not buried his inborn talent (Luke 19: 12-16) but has made use of his original predisposition to good in order to become a better man, can he hope that what is not within his power will be supplied through cooperation from above.

The major distinction of Christianity is thus its focus on the self-improvement of man as a religious principle. The instrument of this moral self-improvement is conscience. In Book IV, where he delineates the faults of clericalism and stresses the virtue of conscience as a director of religious faith, he defines conscience thus (Sec.II, 4):

Conscience might also be defined as follows: it is the moral faculty of judgment, passing judgment upon itself; only this definition would stand in great need of a prior elucidation of the concepts contained in it. Conscience does not pass judgment upon actions as cases which fall under the law; for this is what reason does so far as it is subjectively practical (hence the casus conscientiae and casuistry, as a kind of dialectic of conscience). Rather, reason here judges itself, as to whether it has really undertaken that appraisal of actions (as to whether they are right or wrong) with all diligence, and it calls the man himself to witness for or against himself whether this diligent appraisal did or did not take place.

The aim of civilization is the formation of an ethical commonwealth. As he states in Bk. III, Sec. I (‘Philosophical Account of the Victory of the Good Principle in the Founding of a Kingdom of God on Earth’):

 A union of men under merely moral laws, patterned on the above idea, may be called an ethical, and so far as these laws are public, an ethico-civil (in contrast to a juridico-civil) society or an ethical commonwealth. It can exist in the midst of a political commonwealth and may even be made up of all its members; (indeed, unless it is based upon such a commonwealth it can never be brought into existence by man). It has, however, a special and unique principle of union (virtue), and hence a form and constitution, which fundamentally distinguish it from the political commonwealth.

Further, the ethical commonwealth is necessarily universal:

Because the duties of virtue apply to the entire human race, the concept of an ethical commonwealth is extended ideally to the whole of mankind, and thereby distinguishes itself from the concept of a political commonwealth.

An ethical commonwealth under the direction of Divine Law may be called a ‘church’, ideal as well as actual:

An ethical commonwealth under divine moral legislation is a church which, so far as it is not an object of possible experience, is called the church invisible (a mere idea of the union of all the righteous under direct and moral divine world-government, an idea serving all as the archetype of what is to be established by men). The visible church is the actual union of men into a whole which harmonizes with that ideal.

In Section II of the Book III (‘Historical Account of the gradual Establishment of the Sovereignty of the Good Principle on Earth’), Kant again affirms that only Christianity is qualified to be a universal religion:

We can deal, under this heading, only with the history of that church which contained within itself, from its first beginning, the seed and the principles of the objective unity of the true and universal religious faith, to which it is gradually brought nearer.

The universality of Christianity is based essentially on the fact that the teachings of the Christ are moral instructions and not legalistic:

Christianity possesses the great advantage over Judaism of being represented as coming from the mouth of the first Teacher not as a statutory but as a moral religion, and as thus entering into the closest relation with reason so that, through reason, it was able of itself, without historical learning, to be spread at all times and among all peoples with the greatest trustworthiness. (Bk. IV, Sec. I, ii)

The first important fact to be noted about historical Christianity is its fundamental distinction from Judaism even though the latter provided the ambience in which Christianity grew. Judaism is, indeed, not a religion at all but a political organisation:

The Jewish faith was, in its original form, a collection of mere statutory laws upon which was established a political organization; for whatever moral additions were then or later appended to it in no way whatever belong to Judaism as such. Judaism is really not a religion at all but merely a union of a number of people who, since they belonged to a particular stock, formed themselves into a commonwealth under purely political laws, and not into a church; nay, it was intended to be merely an earthly state so that, were it possibly to be dismembered through adverse circumstances, there would still remain to it (as part of its very essence) the political faith in its eventual re-establishment (with the advent of the Messiah). That this political organization has a theocracy as its basis (visibly, an aristocracy of priests or leaders, who boast of instructions imparted directly by God), and that therefore the name of God, who after all is here merely an earthly regent making absolutely no claims upon, and no appeals to, conscience, is respected — this does not make it a religious organization.

Kant then gives three reasons why Judaism does not develop from a political into a religious organization. The first is its limited social perspective that does not include any truly ethical views based on the crucial human faculty of conscience:

First, all its commands are of the kind which a political organization can insist upon and lay down as coercive laws, since they relate merely to external acts; and although the Ten Commandments are, to the eye of reason, valid as ethical commands even had they not been given publicly, yet in that legislation they are not so prescribed as to induce obedience by laying requirements upon the moral disposition (Christianity later placed its main emphasis here); they are directed to absolutely nothing but outer observance. From this it is also clear that, second, all the consequences of fulfilling or transgressing these laws, all rewards or punishments, are limited to those alone which can be allotted to all men in this world, and not even these [are distributed] according to ethical concepts, since both rewards and punishments were to reach a posterity which has taken no practical part in these deeds or misdeeds. In a political organization this may indeed be a prudent device for creating docility, but in an ethical organization it would be contrary to all right.

Secondly, it has no belief in a future life such as informs all religions:

Since no religion can be conceived of which involves no belief in a future life, Judaism, which, when taken in its purity is seen to lack this belief, is not a religious faith at all. This can be further supported by the following remark. We can hardly question that the Jews, like other peoples, even the most savage, ought [normally] to have had a belief in a future life, and therefore in a heaven and a hell; for this belief automatically obtrudes itself upon everyone by virtue of the universal moral predisposition in human nature. Hence it certainly came about intentionally that the law-giver of this people, even though he is represented as God Himself, wished to pay not the slightest regard to the future life. This shows that he must have wanted to found merely a political, not an ethical commonwealth; and to talk, in a political state, of rewards and punishments which cannot become apparent here in this life-would have been, on that premise, a wholly inconsequential and unsuitable procedure. And though, indeed, it cannot be doubted that the Jews may, subsequently, and each for himself, have framed some sort of religious faith which was mingled with the articles of their statutory belief, such religious faith has never been part and parcel of the legislation of Judaism.

Thirdly, the ‘monotheism’ affected by the Jews is only a sign of their hostility to the rest of the world and of their innate lack of a moral disposition:

Judaism fell so far short of constituting an era suited to the requirements of the church universal, or of setting up this universal church itself during its time, as actually to exclude from its communion the entire human race, on the ground that it was a special people chosen by God for Himself — [an exclusiveness] which showed enmity toward all other peoples and which, therefore, evoked the enmity of all.

In comparison, polytheism is more suited to a universal religion based on morality:

In this connection, we should not rate too highly the fact that this people set up, as universal Ruler of the world, a one and only God who could be represented through no visible image. For we find that the religious doctrines of most other peoples tended in the same direction and that these made themselves suspected of polytheism only by the veneration of certain mighty undergods subordinated to Him. For a God who desires merely obedience to commands for which absolutely no improved moral disposition is requisite is, after all, not really the moral Being the concept of whom we need for a religion. Religion would be more likely to arise from a belief in many mighty invisible beings of this order, provided a people conceived of these as all agreeing, amid their “departmental” differences, to bestow their good pleasure only upon the man who cherishes virtue with all his heart — more likely, I say, than when faith is bestowed upon but one Being, who, however, attaches prime importance to mechanical worship.

Thus Kant concludes that

the Jewish faith stands in no essential connection whatever, i.e., in no unity of concepts, with this ecclesiastical faith whose history we wish to consider, though the Jewish immediately preceded this (the Christian) church and provided the physical occasion for its establishment.

Moreover, any study of historical Christianity must necessarily consider it as a religious revolution:

We cannot, therefore, do otherwise than begin general church history, if it is to constitute a system, with the origin of Christianity, which, completely forsaking the Judaism from which it sprang, and grounded upon a wholly new principle, effected a thoroughgoing revolution in doctrines of faith.

 

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Kant’s conception of the moralistic uniqueness of Christianity is repeated almost a century after Kant by the Berlin philosopher Eugen Dühring (1833–1921) in his comprehensive study of the Jewish Question, Die Judenfrage (1881), which presents the same emphasis on morality and conscience that we have noted in Kant. Indeed, Dühring’s entire critique of Jewry is essentially a moral one. The source of the Jewish corrupt nature is located by Dühring in their basic lack of conscience, and their self-interest and cruelty vis-à-vis the other nations. As he states in Chapter II, ‘Character-reflection in religion and morality’:

The chosen self-interest is the leading principle. From it are explained religious and moral matters in full unity. A morality of self-interest is indeed really the opposite of morality, but only when we understand morality in the better sense and in a way in which it has no home among the Jews. Where there are found among the ancient writers occasional judgements about the Jews, there they are full of contempt against this racial tribe and grope for the strongest expressions to characterize their procedures and customs as depraved.[2]

Exactly like Kant, Dühring prefers the polytheism of the pagans to the Jewish monotheism:

The creation of many gods, of whom one was the most respected and powerful, and over whom in turn stood the all-encompassing Fate — this Greek conception was something which agreed incomparably better with the true nature of things and with freedom than the shrivelling unity of abstract Israelism which twines round all independent life.

The particular virtue of Christianity is the doctrine of Love that informs it:

That esteemed prophet and martyr whom the world is familiar with founded his religion of love of one’s neighbour and self-sacrifice where the disposition of his people indeed bore in itself the most marked tendency in the world to the opposite.

Thus Christianity can only be construed as an attempt at a reform of Jewry:

Historical Christianity considered in its naturalness and in its true spirit was, as already mentioned, a reaction within the Jewry against the latter themselves. It wanted to soften the “hardheartedness” of the Jews through an extreme paradox, that is, through the commandment of the all-sided love which should rise to the point of love of one’s enemy. It has taught the most unconditional love of one’s neighbour and meekness as the only way to salvation where the self-interest and cruelty of the chosen ruled. It has in this way reversed, as it were, the extremes of the Jewish nature and turned against its own characteristics, which form the counterpart of the attributes of a better humanity conceived by it. For this reason however it is also only fully understandable if one considers it as the final self-correction of the Jewry.

However, the reform that Christ aimed at was clearly not successful. Exploitation of other nations has always been the major aim of the Jews and a genuine sense of human rights is utterly lacking in their commercial, essentially usurious, dealings. This belief that non-Jews have no moral worth makes true politics impossible among them:

A society united in self-interest against others must also turn outwards and seek material there for its greed. The Roman conquered the world; but the Jew sought to bring its wealth to himself through devious means. From this is explained the predilection for all commercial activities in which, not so much work, but astute acquisition and sly cheating have a scope.

And the Jewish involvement in all sorts of so-called Socialist movements is only conditioned by their desire to extract advantages for themselves from disturbed social and economic conditions. Even as Kant had characterized Judaism as a political organization rather than a true religion, Dühring reinforces this distinction by pointing out the real aim of this political organization masquerading as a religion:

[In the Old Testament] it has been shown now that their political worship of the Lord is of the same mould as their religious worship of the Lord. Both have the same goal; both create for the Jews in all ways power over another people and over other peoples. Even the entire specific Jewish idea of the Messiah has no other meaning. According to it, a person will arise among them who brings about mastery for them over the whole world and raises them externally over all peoples.

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Contrary to these moralistic German views of Judaism and Christianity are those of  Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who was indeed not only anti-Christian but also anti-Germanic. In his autobiographical work, Ecce Homo (1888), for instance, Nietzsche remarks:

My ancestors were Polish noblemen: it is owing to them that I have so much race instinct in my blood—who knows? perhaps even the liberum veto.[3] When I think of the number of times in my travels that I have been accosted as a Pole, even by Poles themselves, and how seldom I have been taken for a German, it seems to me as if I belonged to those only who have a sprinkling of German in them.[4]

And in the Twilight of the Idols (1889) he presents various reasons for his contempt for modern Germans in the seventh section entitled ‘What the Germans lack’. His aversion to morality is detailed in the fourth section, ‘Morality as the enemy of Nature’, where he makes a childish contrast between the — presumably ‘Dionysiac’ — indulgence of natural appetites and what he considers to be the denial of life exemplified by Christian asceticism. Furthermore, diametrically opposed to Kant’s elevation of morality in his system, Nietzsche proclaims in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) that ‘Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose!’

More remarkable, however, in Nietzsche’s oeuvre, is the increasing blatancy of his preference of Judaism to Christianity. In this context, one may indeed wonder about Nietzsche’s racial constitution. We have noted his enthusiastic adoption of a distant Polish ancestry. However, the latter has not been established by any genealogical records and it is not clear if such a Polish background included Jewish blood. Yet it is certain that his works from 1878 onwards reveal a steadfast glorification of the Jewish spirit and that this glorification was also reciprocated by the efforts of Jewish intellectuals — like the Danish Jew Georg Brandes (1842–1927), for instance[5] — to promote the amoralistic thought of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s denunciations of Christian morality are bound to his firm conviction that the Hebrews represent a superior race. In Beyond good and evil (1886), for instance, he declares:

In the Jewish “Old Testament,” the book of divine justice, there are men, things, and sayings on such an immense scale, that Greek and Indian literature has nothing to compare with it. … To have bound up this New Testament (a kind of Rococo of taste in every respect) along with the Old Testament into one book, as the “Bible,” as “The Book in Itself,” is perhaps the greatest audacity and “sin against the Spirit” which literary Europe has upon its conscience. (Ch.III)[6]

This is in stark contrast to what Dühring had made clear in his work;

The Old Testament is a thoroughly alien book and must become increasingly more alien if we do not wish to alter our character in the long run. In dark times the error could creep in that this piece of Judaism belongs to Christianity. In more enlightened times, on the contrary, the consciousness arises that Christianity was only a reaction against Judaism which, however, was not able to accomplish itself in the Jewish sphere itself. Accordingly, the other peoples will have to see in that chief prophet who arose among the Jews only a spiritual force which sought to redeem the Jews from themselves.

Indeed, according to Dühring:

The morality of the Jews, I mean that which is attached to the race and which, from its commercial activity, has the well-known popular reputation of general harmfulness, is in its core something so naturally grown and in essence so unchangeable that one can point to its spirit even in the oldest religious documents.

Further, in The Anti-Christian (1888), Nietzsche maintains that the priestly section of the Hebrews deliberately and cunningly utilised Christianity — especially through the evangelist Paul — to subvert the aristocratic Roman ethos of Europe:

Psychologically, the Jews are a people gifted with the very strongest vitality, so much so that when they found themselves facing impossible conditions of life they chose voluntarily, and with a profound talent for self-preservation, the side of all those instincts which make for décadence—not as if mastered by them, but as if detecting in them a power by which “the world” could be defied. The Jews are the very opposite of décadents: they have simply been forced into appearing in that guise, and with a degree of skill approaching the non plus ultra of histrionic genius they have managed to put themselves at the head of all décadent movements (for example, the Christianity of Paul), and so make of them something stronger than any party frankly saying Yes to  life. To the sort of men who reach out for power under Judaism and Christianity — that is to say, to the priestly class — décadence is no more than a means to an end. Men of this sort have a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in confusing the values of “good” and “bad,” “true” and “false” in a manner that is not only dangerous to life, but also slanders it.[7]

Whereas Kant and Dühring considered Christianity as an attempt at a reform of Judaism, Nietzsche presents Christianity not as a reform of Jewish, that is Pharisaic, clericalism but rather as a finally absurd intensification of it that results in the destruction of Jewry itself:

The “holy people,” who had adopted priestly values and priestly names for all things, and who, with a terrible logical consistency, had rejected everything of the earth as “unholy,” “worldly,” “sinful” — this people put its instinct into a final formula that was logical to the point of self-annihilation: as Christianity it actually denied even the last form of reality, the “holy people,” the “chosen people,” Jewish reality itself.

What Nietzsche is lamenting here is the loss of the original spirit of Judaism that he believes was represented by its prophets:

It was an insurrection against the “good and just,” against the “prophets of Israel,” against the whole hierarchy of society — not against corruption, but against caste, privilege, order, formalism.

But Dühring, on the other hand, had considered the prophets too as agents of political subversion and conquest:

Even the history of one of the greater prophets, namely Daniel, shows how the Jews, already in the most ancient times, were experienced in the ways of creating influence for themselves among the power-holders. From modern life, however, we do not need any special example of their hereditary customs. How often have the Jews, already from the later Middle Ages and indeed already early precisely in bigoted Spain, apart from many other countries indeed, been the financial artists of the power-holders of the government, whether it be directly or indirectly!

Dühring reminds us that the frequent chastisements expressed by the prophets were mostly directed at the deviation of the Hebrews from their obligatory adherence to Yahweh. But, according to Dühring, the very innovation of monotheism is an indication of the principle of self-interest among the Jews:

Only where self-interest was the chosen predominant one did even religion and the idea of God have to correspond to this character-trait. This has now been the case, in the highest measure, among the Jewish tribe, from its origin onwards. The Jewish idea of Unity [i.e. of a single God] is nothing else but the despotism of self-interest.

Christ, on the other hand, sought in his attacks on the Pharisees to reform the Jewish nature itself:

That esteemed prophet and martyr whom the world is familiar with founded his religion of love of one’s neighbour and self-sacrifice where the disposition of his people indeed bore in itself the most marked tendency in the world to the opposite. This is the solution to the riddle of how Christianity could arise precisely among the Jewish people.

In On the Genealogy of Morality Nietzsche portrays Christianity also as an instrument of the Jewish revenge against the aristocratic Romans who ruled them since the priests

eventually realised that the one method of effecting satisfaction on its enemies and tyrants was by means of a radical transvaluation of values, which was at the same time an act of the cleverest revenge. Yet the method was only appropriate to a nation of priests, to a nation of the most jealously nursed priestly revengefulness.[8]

Nietzsche rightly explains this revengefulness as being due to the native Jewish resentment of superior ‘Roman’ values’:

The Romans were strong and aristocratic; a nation stronger and more aristocratic has never existed in the world, has never even been dreamed of; every relic of them, every inscription enraptures, granted that one can divine what it is that writes the inscription. The Jews, conversely, were that priestly nation of resentment par excellence, possessed by a unique genius for popular morals.

However, Dühring had pointed out that Christianity cannot be considered a revenge against all aristocratic thought — such as that of the Europeans among whom it developed — since its doctrines were indeed better understood by the Europeans than by the Jews who brutally rejected it:

What the new, and indeed the Germanic, peoples have made of Christianity through their own ways of perceiving and feeling is something better than that Jewish-coloured original form of the same. The high founder of the new doctrine has been better understood and evaluated only among the modern peoples; by his own people he was only betrayed and crucified.

Dühring concludes therefrom that the remedy to the ethical enervation of the Europeans must necessarily involve a clear dissociation of Christianity from Judaism:

But neither have the Jews been redeemed from themselves and their inherited nature nor the world from the nuisance which the mixture with Judaism has imposed on it. On the contrary, Christianity has drawn the Jews into world-history behind itself, as it were, and secured everywhere at least a role of second rank among the modern cultured peoples. This protection which Christianity let the Jews participate in — at least in an existence of second rank — is today silenced by the Jews themselves as a rule. Indeed, Christianity is referred to by the Jews, that is, by the Jewish writers, in a manner which must insult not merely a Christian but, in general, every noble-thinking person. The highest martyrdom for mankind, which deserves consideration under all circumstances, has been exposed to the Jewish sneering, and often precisely to the vile Jewish wit, because, in the enlightened public, the better human feelings were too far undermined by the Jewish and half-Jewish press and literature to be able to attain any longer to any powerful counteraction and to ban writings of such a Jewish tone. But this would have been the only means of establishing the damaged human morality in its rights once again, against the Jews.

We see therefore that a careful comparison of the firm anti-Judaism of moralistic philosophers like Kant and Dühring with Nietzsche’s denunciations of Christianity and admiration of the Old Testament of the prophets reveals that Nietzsche — though highly celebrated by European nationalists in recent times — was indeed one of the most subversive pro-Judaic, anti-Christian and anti-Germanic philosophers of the nineteenth century.

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[1] All quotations from this work are from Religion within the Limits of Reason alone, tr. T.M. Greene and H.H. Hudson, 1934.

[2] All quotations are from Eugen Dühring, The Jewish Question as a Racial, Moral and Cultural Question — with a World-historical Answer, translated with an Introduction, Ostara Publications, 2019.

[3] A legislative veto of the nobles in the Polish-Lituanian Commonwealth.

[4] Tr. A.M. Ludovici.

[5] Brandes gave a series of lectures in the late eighteen eighties on Nietzsche’s ‘aristocratic radicalism’ (See Christoph Steding’s remark in The Reich and the Disease of European Culture, Part II [tr. Alexander Jacob, Uthwita Press, 2023]: ‘Nietzsche was not only not accidentally first understood by Jews but he himself repeatedly held up the Jews to the Germans as a model.’)

[6] Tr. H. Zimmern.

[7] Tr. H.L. Mencken.

[8] Tr. H.B. Samuel.