ABSTRACT
William Schweiker asks what we mean when we speak of the highest good. To answer this question, he “thinks with” Kant and “with” the English co-founder of Methodist Protestantism, John Wesley (1708–1791). Happiness, for Kant, results when our basic needs are met and human life can flourish. Christian happiness, for Wesley, results when we perceive “the divine life animating one’s own life.” Both Kant and Wesley argue that we need God to secure happiness: to procure the goods that meet our basic needs (Kant) and to animate our lives with the divine life (Wesley). Schweiker adds his own twist: he maintains that happiness requires two conditions – sufficient goods to meet our basic needs and the divine life to animate our own. For him, the good, grounded in this life, is “bound to the responsibility of persons and communities to exercise and enhance the integrity of life, human, non-human, and even divine life.”
