The Ideal of Reason

The Ideal of Reason

John J. Callanan

[May 2015 – 7180 words, incl. footnotes, not incl. bibliography]

I. Critique and Transcendental Theology

In his submission for the 1763 Berlin Academy Prize Essay competition Moses Mendelssohn offered a defence of rationalism. Descartes had already secured two incontrovertible proofs with it, he claimed, those of the cogito and the ontological proof of God’s existence (Mendelssohn 1997: 275–6). The actuality of one’s own self and the divine being could be proven from the mere analysis of the concepts of the self and God respectively. The runner-up in the competition was Kant, who had offered a more negative picture: not only had no metaphysical results yet been secured, Kant claimed that “no metaphysics has yet been written” (Inquiry, 2: 283). When Mendelssohn returned to the topic of God’s existence in the Morning Hours in 1785, the situation had changed, and he had to acknowledge the enormous influence that the “all-quashing Kant” had wielded in the intervening years, especially with regard to the ontological proof.[1] In his view, Kant’s overall influence had not obviously been a positive one (Mendelssohn 2011: xix). As he saw it, the opposed trends of materialism and religious fanaticism had each continued to grow since the introduction of the Critical philosophy. Mendelssohn’s hope was that there might yet emerge a “Kant who will hopefully build up again with the same spirit with which he has torn down” (Mendelssohn 2011: xx).

Kant himself might reasonably have been disappointed with this characterisation of his ambitions. His goal had never been to tear down religious faith, but rather only to usher in “the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit” (Axi – note). Kant had explicitly included religion within the scope of “everything” here, so as to protect rather than undermine religious belief. In Kant’s opinion, it was the lack of critical self-appraisal amongst those who defend religion that meant that “they excite a just suspicion against themselves” (ibid.) By deploying the method of criticism he had hoped to undermine only the notion that God’s existence was a proper subject matter for theoretical proof or disproof (see A641/B669). This negative result was itself secured only so as to validate a distinct conceptual space for faith (Bxxx). Moreover, Kant repeatedly argued in the first Critique and elsewhere not just for the theoretical space within which one could maintain religious belief but also for the practical demand that one must so believe.[2]

Yet it seems that such was the power of Kant’s negative arguments regarding the impotence of philosophical proof that an image of Kant as explicitly or implicitly hostile to religious belief persisted. Heine, perhaps echoing Mendelssohn, described Kant as having “destructive, world-annihilating thoughts” (Heine 1986: 109). Considered in the context of Heine’s claims, there is something ironic about Kant’s expressed aim of protecting religious believers from suspicion. Ricoeur characterized Marx, Nietzsche and Freud as the three masters of the “school of suspicion” (Ricoeur 1970: 32) – one that undermined our trust in our ordinary conscious experiences and rationalizations as motivationally transparent to ourselves – but Heine had himself already identified Kant as one such master. For Heine, Kant had a “talent for suspicion” and that it iswas most apparent when he “manifested in the direction of thought and was called criticism” (Heine 1986: 109).[3] While Kant viewed critique as the means for protecting religious belief from suspicion, his method for protecting it involved laying bare the cognitive mechanisms through which we come to form such beliefs. These mechanisms – ones certainly not always transparent to common consciousness – show that both the belief in the existence of God and our characterization of Him are both “natural” demands of human beings’ rational capacities.[4]

This approach threatens to raise as much suspicion as it allays. The famous first line of the first edition of the Critique, whereby Kant attributed to reason itself the “peculiar fate” (Avii) of being burdened with ideas that press questions which reason can neither answer nor dismiss, would have seemed to any ordinary reader a strikingly negative opening statement. Moreover, Kant is clear that the idea of God is one such notion. Kant’s manner of defending the naturalness of the idea of God flirted with an account whereby that idea was presented as a by-product of reason’s more ordinary truth-generating operations. For some Kant’s talent for suspicion with regard to the proof of the existence of God threatened to tip over into a suspicion regarding the very idea of God itself.

It is perhaps unsurprising that such an image of Kant should have emerged. The anthropocentric re-orientation of the Copernican turn must have appeared as recommendinged replacing God with human beings as the source of the laws of nature.[5] It is Kant who tells us, for example, that “human reason has a natural propensity to overstep all these boundaries [of possible experience]” and that its “ideas effect a mere, but irresistible, illusion, deception by which one can hardly resist even through the most acute criticism” (A642/B670). Similarly, it is Kant who claims that in order to protect one’s position from attack, one “must always seek the enemy here in ourselves. For speculative reason in its transcendental use is dialectical in itself” (A777/B805). Yet it is surely just as obvious that Kant also had a thoroughly positive outlook with regard to the faculty of reason and its ideas. While acknowledging that the ideas of reason can generate illusions, Kant does not lay the blame with the ideas, which he claims “can never be dialectical in themselves,” but rather with our use of them. The ideas themselves “have their good and purposive vocation in regard to the natural predisposition of our reason” (A699/B697). That a representation that emerges naturally from reason – which is the source of our ability to discriminate truth from falsehood (A699/B697) – might itself be inherently illusory, is a possibility that Kant cannot countenance. As such, Kant is committed to the view that if a rational representation is a natural one, then it must have some positive epistemic function within human experience. Contrary to Heine’s image, Kant’s attitude towards reason’s ideas appears strikingly optimistic, perhaps even pollyannaishPollyannaish.

My focus in this chapter will not be upon the familiar negative onslaught upon the proofs for the existence of God;[6] instead I focus upon the positive theoretical picture that remains despite that onslaught, of Kant’s account of the origin of the concept of God. As mentioned Kant holds that there is a crucial practical interest in and warrant for our use of the concept of God. My focus here though will be upon some of the elements of Kant’s account of the concept’s theoretical role that aroused suspicion. Kant complains that in the past no one has “taken trouble...to understand whether and how one could so much as think of a thing of this kind as rather to prove its existence” (A592/B620). This is the subject matter of “transcendental theology.” Kant characterizes that subject matter as “the thing that contains the supreme condition of the possibility of everything that can be thought (the being of all beings) is the object of theology.”[7] While knowledge of God’s existence is denied, Kant claims that pure reason itself provides the idea that allows for a “transcendental cognition of God (theologia transcendentalis)”(A334/B391).

Kant’s positive account is found in the third Chapter of the Second Book of the Transcendental Dialectic, entitled “The ideal of pure reason,” but also in the second half of the appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic, entitled “On the final aim of the natural dialectic of human reason.” The primary goal of the former section is to reveal a special kind of “sophistical inference, from the totality of conditions for thinking objects in general insofar as they can be given to me I infer the absolute synthetic unity of all conditions for the possibility of things in general” (A340/B398). This fallacy – that of inferring the existence of things from reflections on the conditions of thinking about them – in this instance produces a claim to cognize “a being of all beings.”[8]

In these sections Kant also lays out how the positive conception of God is warranted just because it is a natural demand of human rationality. The account engages with the denunciation of anthropomorphism in religious matters criticized by Montaigne, Spinoza, Hume, and others. Kant was aware in particular of Hume’s claim in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion regarding the attribution of the property of intelligence to the explanatory ground of the universe. Hume’s claim was that such an attribution is merely an instance of the unwarranted anthropomorphic projection of rationality onto that thing, performed for the sole function merely of serving human interests. Kant’s response is striking just because it does not deny many of the essentials of Hume’s account. His position accepts there is such an anthropomorphic projection. Secondly, he acknowledges that such projections do literally mischaracterize the “being of all beings.” Thirdly, he is explicit that the projections are made for the purposes of serving human interests. Nevertheless he claims that our characterizations of God are warranted.

The chapter will be structured as follows. In the following section I briefly consider one aspect of the historical context with which Kant was concerned, namely that of the conditions under which the concept of God is originally formed. In §3 I set out Kant’s own account of the origin of that idea as the transcendental ideal of reason.[9] In §4 I outline the analogical reasoning that is deployed in defence of the characterization of God. I conclude in §5 with a consideration of Kant’s use of the notion of an archetype of rationality. Kant in essence upholds the Leibnizian view of human rationality as partaking in divine rationality but has to justify this claim within the constraints of the Critical system. The peculiar position developed is that it is one of the “interests” of human rationality that it projects its characteristics onto the idea of a divine being, yet only for the purpose of subsequently viewing human reason as a copy of that original divine reason. It is such aspects of Kant’s thinking that plausibly aroused some of the suspicion in its reception.

II. The Origin of the Idea of God

In the Discourse Descartes complained that only the unwarranted presuppositions of empiricists could lead one to think that there is “some difficulty in knowing God.” In general, their error is that “they never raise their minds above things which can be perceived by the senses” (AT vi. 37, CSM i. 129). While it might be the case that sensory representations must be deployed to aid the expression of the concept of God, it does not follow that the content of that concept reduces to such representations.[10] One of Descartes’s targets here is surely Montaigne, who had maintained a far more sceptical attitude towards the possibility of divine knowledge. For Montaigne our conceptualization of God is inherently problematic, since the predicates we might apply are only comprehensible to us from our familiarity with them in the context of their imperfect actualization in the terrestrial realm. This imperfect context of content determination then precludes their apt predication of a perfect being:

Nothing of ours can be compared or associated with the Nature of God, in any way whatsoever, without smudging it and staining it with a degree of imperfection. How can infinite Beauty, Power and Goodness ever suffer any juxtaposition or comparison with a thing as abject as we are, without experiencing extreme harm and derogating from divine Greatness? (Montaigne 2003: 585)

The inappropriate ambition to cognize the divine is itself motivated by the “natural, original distemper of Man,” namely the “presumption” that human beings might share something in common with the divine (Montaigne 2003: 505). For Montaigne, the only available means of representation of God available to us is that of analogical representation, but the anthropomorphic projections it invariably produces reveals more about human hubris than anything about a divine being. For example, he describes virtue as that which is particular to human beings, on the grounds of it being a status achieved in the face of the temptations and frailties of our nature. It follows, he claims, that a perfect being, lacking temptations and imperfections as it does, cannot achieve that particular status:

Take Prudence; that consists in a choice between good and evil; how can that apply to God? No evil can touch him. Or take Reason and Intelligence, by which we seek to attain clarity amidst obscurity; there is nothing obscure to God. Or Justice, which distributes to each his due and which was begotten for the good of society and communities of men; how can that exist in God? (Montaigne 2003: 556)

In the Port-Royal Logic, Arnauld and Nicole attack similar approaches to the issue of God’s moral attributes. They quote Cicero’s reporting of Cotta’s argument in De Natura Deorum:

[S]hall we then assign to God that prudence which distinguishes things good, things evil, and things neither good nor evil? But if a being does not and cannot partake of evil, what need has he to make choice between good things and evil things, and what need has he or reason and understanding? We apply these faculties to advance from what is revealed to what is hidden, but nothing can be hidden from God.[11] (Arnauld and Nicole 1996, Pt. III, Ch. 19: 200)

Arnauld and Nicole are outraged by this kind of “impertinent” argument, glossing it as the claim that since God could have no virtues similar to those found in humans, that therefore God must lack virtue altogether (Arnauld and Nicole 1996: 201).[12] But they are unfair to the argument here: the claim by Cotta and Montaigne is not that we cannot conceive of a being having a perfect instantiation of that which is imperfectly instantiated in human beings; rather, it questions how an attribute whose core content is originally defined relative to a context of instantiation in finite beings could be commensurably manifested in an infinite and perfect being at all.