Religion within the Boundaries of Technicity: Returning to Kant on the Question of Technics

This dissertation draws upon Bernard Stiegler’s theory of technicity and his arguments regarding the repression of technics in the history of philosophical thought and uses these insights to reread Immanuel Kant’s formulation of human subjectivity as it appears in the context of his moral philosophy and theory of religion. The work of this project is directed at two related, but distinct tasks. First, I seek to expose a pattern of thought that I argue hinders our ability to find room to reflect on and defend moral agency. It is a pattern of thought that emerged after the Second World War, notably through the influential writings of Martin Heidegger, and has continued to develop alongside revised accounts of the human-technical relation. Second, I offer a rereading of Kant, through the lens of originary technicity, that unlocks resources for thinking about what it means to be both a moral being as well as a technical being. Together these two concerns are meant to offer a defense of moral freedom against those who, to use Kant’s words, “pretend to have seen deeper into the essence of things and therefore boldly declare that freedom is impossible” (Kant, Groundwork 4:459)