Kant
also believed that Hume thought that “we apply only ontological
predicates (eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence)” to God. What Hume
required were “properties which can yield a concept in
concreto”. The ontological predicates, according to Kant, were
“superadded”. That is, predicates such as eternity, omnipresence
and omnipotence aren't intrinsic properties. They are, if you like,
simply God's abilities and powers. What Hume wanted is a “criterion
of identity” (to use a 20th century term) for God's
nature, not simply descriptions of His abilities and powers.
It’s
as if someone were to describe a rose by saying that “it delights
people and is an emblem of love”, instead of saying that roses are
"red, physically constituted by certain natural materials and give off a sweet pungency".
Hume was asking:
What
is God? I don’t want to know His powers or what He does.
Kant
would have said that God's intrinsic properties are beyond us because
such properties can only be given in experience. This prompts the
question: Aren’t the properties of omnipotence, omnipresence
also given only in experience? Isn't part of God’s essence, as
it were, the fact that He is beyond experience? Not only that:
part of God’s essence (for Kant) is that He is beyond experience.
If we wanted more than this, we would be, Kant said, guilty of “anthropomorphism”. This is what many theists
were guilty of in Kant's day (as well as later).
In
a sense Kant sympathised with Hume’s deism and sided with him
against theism and all other “anthropomorphisms”. Theism, or at
least anthropomorphism, is for crude God-lovers who somehow project
their own properties or attributes onto God (as Feuerbach, Marx,
Nietzsche and Freud were later to elaborate upon). However, despite
what's been said, Humean deism is going too far... or so Kant thought.
Kant’s view of deism is unequivocal. He says, “nothing can come”
of it. Not only that: it “is of no value” and “cannot serve as
any foundation to religion or morals”.
So
whereas theism is too human (Nietzsche's “all too human”), deism
is too anti-human. Kant therefore attempted, as ever, to find some
kind of middle way between the two extremes.
Kant
was unhappy with anthropomorphism (therefore theism?). We mustn't
“transfer predicates from the world of sense to a being quite
distinct from the world”. The end result of Kant’s vision of God
is therefore quite unequivocal. We must
“acknowledge
that the Supreme Being is quite inscrutable and even unthinkable in
any determinate way as to what it is in itself”.
God
is, therefore, another noumenol being.
Kant
again agreed with Hume who thought that it's wise
“not
to carry the use of reason dogmatically beyond the field of all
possible experience”.
However,
Kant had a problem with this dogmatic attitude towards reason itself.
He thought that Hume shouldn't “consider the field of experience as
one which bounds itself in the eyes of our reason”. Reason
therefore comes to Kant’s rescue again. Reason can take us beyond
“all possible experience” and give us the means to understand, if
not know, God Himself (in this instance). Indeed Kant called Hume’s
dogmatism towards reason “scepticism”. And Kant, yet again,
attempted to find “the true mean between dogmatism…and
scepticism”.
Kant
reiterated why he thought that we can transcend experience. He said
that experience
“does
not bound itself; it only proceeds in every case from the conditioned
to some other equally conditioned thing”.
However,
experience’s
“boundary
must lie quite without it, and this is the field of the pure beings
of the understanding”.
Of
course it's reason which takes us to these “pure beings of the
understanding”. It's also natural theology, via reason, which takes
us beyond “the boundary of human reason”. It “looks beyond this
boundary to the idea of a Supreme Being”.
Yet
again Kant shows us that there's an illusive bridge between the
offerings of experience and that which is beyond experience. He
concedes
“that
reason by all it’s a priori principles never teaches us anything
more than objects of possible experience”.
This
doesn't mean that
“this
limitation does not prevent reason from leading us to the objective
boundary of experience, viz., to the reference to something which is
not itself an object of experience but must be the highest ground of
all experience”.
Kant
concedes that reason “does not, however, teach us anything
concerning the thing in itself”. So what does reason do? It “only
instructs us as regards its own complete and highest use in the field
of possible experience”. Reason takes us beyond possible
experience; though only into the field of conjecture, supposition and
speculation. It doesn't give us absolute knowledge of what lies
beyond the boundaries of possible experience. It does, though, show
us the boundaries themselves and what may lie beyond them.
Kant
was clear that it's metaphysics itself that takes us beyond the
bounds of possible experience. He said that pure reason is compelled “to
quite the mere contemplation of nature, to transcend all possible
experience” and to “endeavour to produce the thing…called
metaphysics”.
Metaphysics
frees “our concepts from the fetters of experience and from the
limits of the mere contemplation of nature” and allows us into the
“field containing mere objects for the pure understanding which no
sensibility can reach”. It's in passages like this that Kant shows
us how far removed from the tenets of empiricism he was; despite the
fact that he, in certain senses, fused empiricism and rationalism.
The empiricists believed that there's no knowledge beyond experience.
Kant agreed. However Kant also believed that metaphysics took us
beyond experience into the realm of “pure beings” which,
nevertheless, couldn't be known. It was these flights of fancy that
traditional empiricism was against. Indeed later 20th century
empiricists - the logical empiricists - thought that it's precisely
these Kantian flights of fancy (even if they didn't claim to give us
knowledge) which resulted in metaphysics itself becoming
“meaningless” or “nonsense”.
Kant
did indeed strike a balance between extreme rationalism (which has no
time at all for experiences or the senses) and extreme empiricism
(which equally has no time for anything which is putatively beyond
sense experience). Kant himself criticised Plato for floating off
into the ether because he had no solid moorings in the world of
sense. However, Kant also accused hard-core empiricists (such as
Hume) of being “sceptics”.
Was
it the case, then, that Kant was between a rock and a hard place? Or,
as David Lewis once put it, was Kant “between the rock of
fallibilism and the whirlpool of scepticism” (in his paper 'Elusive
Knowledge' of 1996)? Does it indeed make sense to talk about what
lies beyond sense experience? Equally, doesn’t empiricism (in its
extreme forms) annihilate the very practice of metaphysics and,
ultimately, all philosophy?
******************************************************
*)
All the passages from Kant are taken from his Prolegomena
to Any Future Metaphysics (the Paul Carus translation
of 1902).
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