7 - Hope and Faith: God in the Critique of Teleological Judgment

Summary

Chapter 7 argues that Kant introduces a new conception of the relation of the systems of freedom and nature as reciprocal. Here, under the auspices of what he calls an “ethicotheology,” he describes these two systems as sharing an identical final end, and therefore also being conjoined by that very end. Such a description of this relation is only possible if we view the relation of the two systems from out in the territory. This reflective standpoint further judges freedom as a fact in nature, and opens up the possibility of us being convinced of the existence of God as the author of a nature that now, ineluctably, appears to us as meaningful. In this, nature is something we have a sense of as belonging to us.