Nicholas Tampio's Kantian Courage is a breath of fresh air in a field too often marked by pious exegeses of the canonical Enlightenment thinkers or bitter rejections of our Enlightenment heritage (e.g., Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944). One of the great virtues of Tampio's book is its ambitious attempt to make the Enlightenment relevant for modern times, to have it speak to contemporary crises and policy dilemmas. Although Tampio is a sensitive reader of Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers, his main interest is in rejuvenation, not interpretation. As he says early in the book, “the thread that connects us to the Enlightenment is an ethos rather than a doctrine” (p. 17), and this ethos consists of the Kantian courage to think for ourselves; he thus rejects the orthodoxy of Kant interpreters such as Allen Wood in favor of the jurisprudential and critical appropriations of Kant by John Rawls and Gilles Deleuze, who serve as his moderate and radical poles, respectively, of the contemporary Enlightenment. Tampio's ability to span these poles, to speak confidently to contemporary theorists both analytic and continental, is another great virtue of the book; he tries to reconcile these mutually uncomprehending, mutually suspicious scholarly sects by mastering their texts and revealing the connections between them. By doing so, he helps us to “exercise [our] autonomy to create new political theories” (p. 195), ones responsive to the challenges of our own era—especially the contentious relationship between Islam and the West.
Chapter 1 presents three contemporary “moments” of Kantian courage—faithful (Wood), reformist (Rawls), and revolutionary (Deleuze)—all of which contribute to advancing today's Enlightenment in different but equally valuable ways. As Tampio puts it: “Kantian courage … is a comportment of mind that honors the achievements of the historical Enlightenment, seeks to revise and actualize its ideals, and presses us to constantly rethink its fundamental commitments” (p. 69). He then turns in the second chapter to three historical events that force us to rethink not just the problems that Kant confronted in his own time but the solutions he offered: first, the rise of Darwinism as a challenge to philosophic naturalism, to which Rawls and Deleuze respond by incorporating Humean insights into their Kantian theories; second, the Holocaust as a disastrous failure in the common-sense morality of a great European nation, which may call for either the reformist transformation of doxa via reflective equilibrium (Rawls) or the revolutionary rejection of it due to its criminal complicity (Deleuze); third, 9/11 as a call to confront religious diversity at home and extremism abroad, making especially relevant the ideas of an overlapping consensus (Rawls) and rhizome (Deleuze). In Chapter 3, Tampio surveys Rawls and Deleuze's metaethical debts to Kant: Both men employ Kant's constructivism in creating conceptions of the person, laying out the planes or landscapes on which these conceptions think and choose (such as Rawls's original position), discerning the principles that would be endorsed there, and evaluating these principles to determine their worth. Lastly, in Chapter 4, Tampio offers an application of the preceding to a pressing political problem: the need to accommodate Muslim minorities in Western societies and Muslim nations in the global order. After rejecting Kant's own approach to religious pluralism as too narrow, dogmatic, and exclusionary to be of any direct use, he turns to the writings of Rawls, Deleuze, and the Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan for guidance; their theories, more faithful to the spirit of Kant's ethico-theology than to its letter, serve the cause of interfaith dialogue and reconciliation.
This emphasis on spirit rather than letter, ethos rather than doctrine, serves Tampio well in his effort to make the historical Enlightenment applicable to our own times and problems. But it also leads to some strange oversights and missed opportunities. For example, although Tampio examines the treatment of Muslims within Western liberal democracies and on the international stage, he has strikingly little to say about Muslims in the very context where they are most likely to be found: Muslim-majority societies. What are these societies like? With important exceptions (e.g., Turkey), they possess many, and sometimes all of the following features, especially in the Arab world, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan: sectarian violence and repression (often of Sunnis against Shia and Sufis); harsh punishment, even execution, for heresy and apostasy; absolute monarchy and other forms of authoritarian government; virulent anti-Semitism; second-class citizenship for religious minorities (e.g., Jews, Christians), often involving ghettoization; exercise of temporal authority by religious leaders, either directly (e.g., Iran) or indirectly (e.g., Saudi Arabia); export of terrorism and other species of violence to non-Muslim countries; and justification of all of the preceding by tendentious readings of Islamic holy texts. I present this list of characteristics not in order to disparage these societies, but in the expectation that it will sound familiar to Westerners with even a rudimentary knowledge of their own history: Christian Europe had similar features before, during, and even after the Enlightenment. This is the Europe to which the great thinkers of the Enlightenment addressed themselves, the Europe they fought so desperately to reform.
Nonetheless, Tampio suggests it would be “unfair to demand that Muslims learn the exact same lessons about religion and politics as Euro-American philosophers did in the 18th century” (p. 159). Although the lessons are unlikely to be exactly the same, it would also be remarkable if they were dramatically different, given the parallel political pathologies involved. Consider, for example, the last entry in the above list: scriptural hermeneutics in the service of repression and violence. Kant's response to this feature of the Christian tradition (and other religious traditions as well) was a radical inversion: “since … the moral improvement of human beings … constitutes the true end of all religion of reason, it will also contain the supreme principle of all scriptural exegesis” (Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 6:112). In other words, we should not first seek moral guidance from holy texts (a dubious source) but instead from pure practical reason, which reveals to us a universal morality, one that can teach us how to read these texts properly, i.e., in the service of toleration and peace, not repression and violence. This is a lesson that Ramadan himself appears to have learned well, as Tampio reveals with the following example of Ramadan's Qur'anic hermeneutics: “‘If God had willed, He would have made you one community but things are as they are to test you in what He has given you. So compete with each other in doing good.’ Ramadan interprets this famous verse of the Qur'an (5:48) to say that God has willed diversity and Muslims should appreciate that the world has hermitages, synagogues, and chapels as well as mosques” (p. 183). Other readings of this section of the Qur'an are surely possible—a few verses before, Jews are condemned as deceivers and greedy usurers (5:41–2), and a few later, Muslims are warned not to take Jews and Christians as friends (5:51)—but Ramadan's central concern here is not historical/textual fidelity but moral progress. Muslims must be persuaded that religious pluralism is divinely mandated and thus worthy of celebration, not consternation, and Qur'anic text is duly deployed for this political purpose. Kant would no doubt approve of this interpretive strategy, seeing it as an application of his religious doctrine across confessional lines.
Tampio is right to argue that we need the courage to move beyond the doctrines of the historical Enlightenment when those doctrines fail to speak to our concerns, and his book is an excellent primer on what such courage entails. But we also need the wisdom to adopt (or at times adapt) those doctrines when they do speak to our concerns. The problem of religiously-justified repression and violence was sadly familiar to the Enlightenment's luminaries, and their proposed solutions are worthy of our attention—and nowhere more so than in the Islamic world.
