Kant & Hume on the Nature of God

 

According to Kant, God is experience- or evidence-transcendent. In this sense, he quite agreed with Hume.

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 20^th 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?

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*) All the passages from Kant are taken from his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (the Paul Carus translation of 1902).

Kant on Analytic & Synthetic Judgements

 

According to Kant, analytic judgements are made up of subject and a predicate. The predicate expresses nothing which isn't already contained in the subject.

Take this analytic judgement:

         “All bodies are extended.”

Here the subject is “all bodies” and the predicate is “(are) extended”. Within the subject is contained the concept [extended]. According to Kant, “I have not amplified the concept of body, but only analysed it."

Now take the following:

      “All bodies have weight.”

Here the subject is again “all bodies” and this time the predicate is “have weight”. This judgement is synthetic because the predicate “have weight” isn't contained in the subject “all bodies”. This predicate, therefore, “amplifies” rather than “analyses” the subject.

We now have two terms which sum up what's just been written:

       “explicative judgement” – adds nothing to the subject = analytic

       “ampliative judgement” – increases the given cognition = synthetic

In what way do we know the analytic judgement to be true or false? We know it a priori. Take this judgement:

       “Gold is a yellow metal.”

The concepts involved in the judgement above are empirical in nature. However, the statement above, according to Kant, can still be known to be true a priori. The reason for this is that, again, the predicate “yellow metal” adds nothing to the subject “gold”. According to Kant, we “require no experience beyond our concept of gold”. Yellowness (as it were) is contained in the concept [gold]. That means that the statement can be known to be true a priori.

Arithmetic

According to Kant, arithmetical judgements are all synthetic and not analytic, as was commonly thought in his time (e.g. by Hume). However

         7+ 5 = 12

is still knowable a priori; though it's nevertheless synthetic. Arithmetical statements are a priori “because they carry with them necessity, which cannot be obtained from experience”.

Why isn’t the above a mere analytic judgement such as “a = a”? Why is it synthetic and a priori? After all

         7 + 5 = 12

basically means

        12 = 12

which is a tautology of the kind

        A = A.

And

        7 + 5 = 13

would be a contradiction of the kind

    12 = 13

or

     A = B

Why does Kant think that 7 + 5 = 12 is a priori as well as synthetic? This is how Kant himself puts it:

“The concept of twelve is by no means thought by merely thinking of the combination of seven and five…”

Kant continues:

“…analyse this possible sum as we may, we shall not discover twelve in the concept.”

We can't find the concept [12] within the concept [7 + 5]. What more do we need? According to Kant:

“We must go beyond these concepts by calling to our aid some intuition corresponding to one of them, i.e., either our five fingers or five points…”

This is very difficult to grasp without an explication of the notion of intuition. However, it's the intuition itself that's synthetic. Therefore the “five fingers or five points” needed for the intuition are derived from experience. Therefore they're synthetic (or the experience is). The judgement is synthetic a priori. To use Kant’s terms, the concept [12] is an “amplification” of the concept [7 + 5].

What about geometry?

Geometry

Take the following principle of geometry:

            “A straight line is the shortest path between two points.”

According to Kant, that statement is a synthetic judgement. Though it's also knowable a priori. It's relatively easy to see why the above is knowable a priori, but why is it also synthetic? Kant says:

“The concept of the shortest is therefore altogether additional and cannot be obtained by any analysis of the concept of the straight line.”

The concept [shortest] isn't contained in the concept a [straight line]. Or, more accurately, the concept [the shortest path between two points] isn't contained in the concept [a straight line]. Here again, according to Kant, “intuition must come to aid us”. Presumably here the (empirical) intuition is this:

           a------------------------------------------b

That is, a straight line between two points.

Kant then summarises all the above. He calls synthetic a priori judgements “apodeictic”; just as we would call an analytic judgement “apodeictic”. Such judgements are apodeictic because the predicate is already contained in the subject. However, unlike a pure analytic judgement, such as

             “All bodies are bodies.”

we need a “necessarily present intuition” which supplies the synthetic part of the judgement or statement. Unlike the above analytic statement,

      

“the predicate [12] belongs to this concept [7 + 5] necessarily indeed, yet not directly but indirectly by means of a necessarily present intuition”.

Kant went beyond the mere empirical synthesis of perceptions. He thought that there is a priori synthesis too. When perceptions are synthesized a priori, they are given, according to Kant, “universal validity”.