Kant: The One Possible Basis for a Demonstration of the Existence of God
(Treash translation, University of Nebraska Press, 1994)
Yay long names!
This is an essay from 1762, close to twenty years before Kant wrote the book that defined him (and the history of philosophy from that point on). Here we see Kant before he has developed the 'Critical' approach to philosophy. It is an interesting picture, since we know very well what he will become in the future. What we find is a man held by the Enlightenment and his predecessors, but with something of a unique flavor and a few approaches to the same old that would come to be definitive in both perfecting and ending the Enlightenment. Thus we have two men: the first I will call Kant the classicist, the second Kant the critic.
The actual content of this essay is primarily (as can be gleaned from the very explanatory title) about arguments for the existence of God. For Kant at this point there are two directions from which one can engage in an attempted proof of God's existence: "either from rational concepts of the merely possible, or from the empirical concepts of the existent." (p. 223) This sounds rather familiar. Just like he will in the future, Kant the critic makes the division (though not explicitly until the conclusion of the essay) of the rational and the empirical, of reason and experience. Each of these lends itself to certain types of proofs for God. The first two portions of his essay focus on the two he finds useful: the rationalist proof (that is, the a priori proof) of a necessary being, and the empirical proof based upon the order and harmony of experience.
I will engage these two proofs in reverse order, first discussing the empirical proof. Before we continue, attentive people may have noted that the title of the essay is, in fact, "The One Possible Basis," not, "The Two Possible Bases." This is still true. In Kant's discussion of the empirical (which I will from this point call, with Kant, the cosmological) proof, he notes that, strictly speaking, it is not a proof: "this mode of proof is incapable of mathematical precision and certainty." (p. 233) Despite its lack of absolute certainty, Kant goes to great lengths to commend the strengths of the cosmological argument, which lie primarily in their power to convince and persuade: "It is so natural, engaging, and extends its reflections so well with the growth of our understanding that it must endure for so long as there is any rational creature who wants to take part in the noble study of knowing God in his work." (p. 233) At times he borders on the poetic. We are awestruck by the incredible order and harmony of nature and of all within, the way in which such a number of things can align so well with each other, that it just screams out the name of some grand creator.
Though he may appear to wax poetic, however, Kant maintains at least a somewhat measured eye. For our early Kant the true sense of order and harmony is not to be found in the mere existence of things, but in the laws that support them: "The utility and excellence of [a] natural arrangement is absolutely no reason for passing over the general and simple efficient laws of matter and for not regarding this construction as a secondary consequence of them." (p. 167) Thus it is the laws of nature which allow for much harmony and order, and that they do so in such a manner leads one to conclude the existence of God. A rather large chunk of the essay is spent arguing for the application of natural laws in astronomical knowledge to this end.
While Kant is certainly doing the right thing in noting forcing God upon every step of the existence of the world and of allowing for natural explanations, what he is doing is in fact not really new or different from what many of his predecessors had done. Laws of nature were not new, and ascribing them to God was certainly not new either. Here we see a bit of Kant the classicist arguing familiar arguments about harmony and order, something people look at after the existentialist/structuralist movements and can't help but smile at. It is still to be recalled that Kant doesn't give this argument the title of certainty, but he could be more critical against it, and he will be in the future.
The real 'basis' for demonstrating God's existence, and the first argument presented in the essay, is in fact given and concluded within the first twenty pages. It is completely a priori and is dubbed the ontological argument. The first step in Kant's plan is to smash the prior attempt by Descartes to make the argument work. In short, the idea of God is of a perfect being, a perfect being has all perfections, existence is not a perfection, so the perfect being must exist. Kant's attack is very short and very decisive: existence is not a predicate, and thus cannot be a perfection. To say God has all perfections is to describe him as having all the perfect predicates, but if existence is not one, it doesn't prove his existence. Kant's argument that existence is not a predicate is relatively short: to be able to describe a thing completely requires being able to describe it as both actual and possible. That is, to describe the concept of Julius Caesar completely, I need to be able to describe him as both a thing that exists and one that may not. Both descriptions must be the same, otherwise they are not both the same concept. If existence were a predicate that things could have, the Julius Caesar that may only possibly exist (and thus does not actually have the predicate of existence for certain) and the Caesar that does exist are not the same concept. Caesar, then, is not Caesar. Existence is not a predicate.
Kant then presents his own ontological argument. It is summarized as follows:
1) Things are possible (one thing can become another, for example).
2) For things to be possible, not only must there be no contradiction, but both the start and endpoints must be conceivable, for "every possibility is something which can be conceived and to which the logical relation in accord with the law of contradiction belongs." (p. 69)
3) There cannot be nothing as one part or the other of the relation. This is because "It is absolutely impossible that nothing exist." (p. 71) (This is an interesting point which I will address shortly).
4) Thus possibility itself depends upon something actual, for "Either the possible is conceivable only insofar as it is itself actual . . . or it is possible because something else is actual." (p. 71)
5) "According there is a certain actuality whose annulment itself would totally annul all internal possibility. But that whose annulment or negation eradicates all possibility is absolutely necessary." (p. 79) Thus a necessary being must exist.
It seems to be quite a strong argument, and at the time Kant certainly seemed convinced. Yet historically we know he would not stay this way. Why is this?
There are a few criticisms I might bring up, but here I will engage the argument at point three, "There cannot be nothing as one part or the other of the relation." This is not exactly how Kant phrases it. I have done so because in this manner we can come to see the problem with the argument and see where Kant is not yet the Kant who will become legendary. When we picture possibility in the manner Kant describes, what we see is a chain of thing one, possibility arrow, thing two:
Thing A --possibility-> Thing B
For Kant it is impossible that nothing exist because, if it did, it would completely deny possibility. Think about it: if we place "nothing" as one of our things,
Thing A --possibility-> _______
You just have thing A. There is nothing into which A can change, thus there is no possibility. 'Nothing' is thus defeated logically. "[T]hat through which the matter and the data for all possibility are annulled is also that through which all possibility is denied." (p. 71) So there must be something on both ends, for if not, there would be nothing. Thus possibility entails something necessary. Very impressive.
Later on, however, Kant says something more suggestive: "I find first that whatever I have to regard as absolutely nothing and absolutely impossible must negate everything thinkable. For if anything remained to be thought it would not be totally inconceivable and absolutely impossible." (p. 77) The philosopher Edmund Husserl, the man who made famous the term "phenomenology," also made famous another term: intentionality. Intentionality states that all thought is thought about something. When I think, I think about what I want to do later, or what I just read, or even what I was just thinking about. Thought without content is literally impossible, for then it is no longer thought.
The same can be said about nothing. Thinking about nothing is impossible, because there is nothing to be thought of. Kant is aware of this. However, when we try to apply nothing in an argument or in language generally, we have problems. Just like our thought is about things, our words are about things. To talk about 'nothing' is to treat it like a thing, which is exactly wrong. It may be inconceivable to discuss nothing, but that only means that our minds cannot conceive of it, not that it doesn't exist. So when we say that nothing is impossible because it eliminates possibility, it is true, but for the wrong reason. It is true because it is a tautology, because nothing isn't any thing. But 'nothing' cannot be put into our equation of possibility, because it does not have the 'thing' status that logic requires. (Think of it like this: we indicate the absence of something in logic by saying, "not A", or ~A. But that makes a specific reference to a thing, A. We can't say 'not anything' in logic, because we have to have a reference. Kant recognizes this as well, but does not take it anywhere.)
In the sense of the argument, then, to say that nothing is impossible is not useful. Yet to argue for a divine being it is necessary to say that nothing cannot be, for otherwise our equation could be left with a hole and something would be necessary to complete it and explain the possibility of things. Hence, necessary being. But if the argument is limited by our own understanding (as we have seen), the problem could be elsewhere. The sceptic is not impressed.
"[S]omething may be absolutely necessary either when through its opposite the formal element of all conceivability is annulled, that is, when it contradicts itself; or when its non-being annuls the material element for all thought and all data for it." (p. 77) In other words, necessity depends on our ability to conceive of it, as though denial of logic and understanding would make the world blink out. It is in this wise that Kant is still a man of his times: he holds, like all others around him, that the world can essentially be understood by man, that laws which organize that world are there, that they fit into logical conformity and can in such way be understood. Thus he was still the classicist and, in that wise, the dogmatist. If someone can shock him out of this with a thorough and damaging attack on human reason, he might have to change his tune. Well, that person came. His name was David Hume, and he was a sceptic par excellence. And instead of hiding behind ideas of common sense and dogmatism, Kant decided to engage scepticism head on. He became Kant the critic, and decided the only right path would be an appraisal of the human capacity for understanding. In other words, a Critique of Pure Reason.
-----
Coming up: You know it. You fear it. It's the Critique of Pure Reason.
Yay long names!
This is an essay from 1762, close to twenty years before Kant wrote the book that defined him (and the history of philosophy from that point on). Here we see Kant before he has developed the 'Critical' approach to philosophy. It is an interesting picture, since we know very well what he will become in the future. What we find is a man held by the Enlightenment and his predecessors, but with something of a unique flavor and a few approaches to the same old that would come to be definitive in both perfecting and ending the Enlightenment. Thus we have two men: the first I will call Kant the classicist, the second Kant the critic.
The actual content of this essay is primarily (as can be gleaned from the very explanatory title) about arguments for the existence of God. For Kant at this point there are two directions from which one can engage in an attempted proof of God's existence: "either from rational concepts of the merely possible, or from the empirical concepts of the existent." (p. 223) This sounds rather familiar. Just like he will in the future, Kant the critic makes the division (though not explicitly until the conclusion of the essay) of the rational and the empirical, of reason and experience. Each of these lends itself to certain types of proofs for God. The first two portions of his essay focus on the two he finds useful: the rationalist proof (that is, the a priori proof) of a necessary being, and the empirical proof based upon the order and harmony of experience.
I will engage these two proofs in reverse order, first discussing the empirical proof. Before we continue, attentive people may have noted that the title of the essay is, in fact, "The One Possible Basis," not, "The Two Possible Bases." This is still true. In Kant's discussion of the empirical (which I will from this point call, with Kant, the cosmological) proof, he notes that, strictly speaking, it is not a proof: "this mode of proof is incapable of mathematical precision and certainty." (p. 233) Despite its lack of absolute certainty, Kant goes to great lengths to commend the strengths of the cosmological argument, which lie primarily in their power to convince and persuade: "It is so natural, engaging, and extends its reflections so well with the growth of our understanding that it must endure for so long as there is any rational creature who wants to take part in the noble study of knowing God in his work." (p. 233) At times he borders on the poetic. We are awestruck by the incredible order and harmony of nature and of all within, the way in which such a number of things can align so well with each other, that it just screams out the name of some grand creator.
Though he may appear to wax poetic, however, Kant maintains at least a somewhat measured eye. For our early Kant the true sense of order and harmony is not to be found in the mere existence of things, but in the laws that support them: "The utility and excellence of [a] natural arrangement is absolutely no reason for passing over the general and simple efficient laws of matter and for not regarding this construction as a secondary consequence of them." (p. 167) Thus it is the laws of nature which allow for much harmony and order, and that they do so in such a manner leads one to conclude the existence of God. A rather large chunk of the essay is spent arguing for the application of natural laws in astronomical knowledge to this end.
While Kant is certainly doing the right thing in noting forcing God upon every step of the existence of the world and of allowing for natural explanations, what he is doing is in fact not really new or different from what many of his predecessors had done. Laws of nature were not new, and ascribing them to God was certainly not new either. Here we see a bit of Kant the classicist arguing familiar arguments about harmony and order, something people look at after the existentialist/structuralist movements and can't help but smile at. It is still to be recalled that Kant doesn't give this argument the title of certainty, but he could be more critical against it, and he will be in the future.
The real 'basis' for demonstrating God's existence, and the first argument presented in the essay, is in fact given and concluded within the first twenty pages. It is completely a priori and is dubbed the ontological argument. The first step in Kant's plan is to smash the prior attempt by Descartes to make the argument work. In short, the idea of God is of a perfect being, a perfect being has all perfections, existence is not a perfection, so the perfect being must exist. Kant's attack is very short and very decisive: existence is not a predicate, and thus cannot be a perfection. To say God has all perfections is to describe him as having all the perfect predicates, but if existence is not one, it doesn't prove his existence. Kant's argument that existence is not a predicate is relatively short: to be able to describe a thing completely requires being able to describe it as both actual and possible. That is, to describe the concept of Julius Caesar completely, I need to be able to describe him as both a thing that exists and one that may not. Both descriptions must be the same, otherwise they are not both the same concept. If existence were a predicate that things could have, the Julius Caesar that may only possibly exist (and thus does not actually have the predicate of existence for certain) and the Caesar that does exist are not the same concept. Caesar, then, is not Caesar. Existence is not a predicate.
Kant then presents his own ontological argument. It is summarized as follows:
1) Things are possible (one thing can become another, for example).
2) For things to be possible, not only must there be no contradiction, but both the start and endpoints must be conceivable, for "every possibility is something which can be conceived and to which the logical relation in accord with the law of contradiction belongs." (p. 69)
3) There cannot be nothing as one part or the other of the relation. This is because "It is absolutely impossible that nothing exist." (p. 71) (This is an interesting point which I will address shortly).
4) Thus possibility itself depends upon something actual, for "Either the possible is conceivable only insofar as it is itself actual . . . or it is possible because something else is actual." (p. 71)
5) "According there is a certain actuality whose annulment itself would totally annul all internal possibility. But that whose annulment or negation eradicates all possibility is absolutely necessary." (p. 79) Thus a necessary being must exist.
It seems to be quite a strong argument, and at the time Kant certainly seemed convinced. Yet historically we know he would not stay this way. Why is this?
There are a few criticisms I might bring up, but here I will engage the argument at point three, "There cannot be nothing as one part or the other of the relation." This is not exactly how Kant phrases it. I have done so because in this manner we can come to see the problem with the argument and see where Kant is not yet the Kant who will become legendary. When we picture possibility in the manner Kant describes, what we see is a chain of thing one, possibility arrow, thing two:
Thing A --possibility-> Thing B
For Kant it is impossible that nothing exist because, if it did, it would completely deny possibility. Think about it: if we place "nothing" as one of our things,
Thing A --possibility-> _______
You just have thing A. There is nothing into which A can change, thus there is no possibility. 'Nothing' is thus defeated logically. "[T]hat through which the matter and the data for all possibility are annulled is also that through which all possibility is denied." (p. 71) So there must be something on both ends, for if not, there would be nothing. Thus possibility entails something necessary. Very impressive.
Later on, however, Kant says something more suggestive: "I find first that whatever I have to regard as absolutely nothing and absolutely impossible must negate everything thinkable. For if anything remained to be thought it would not be totally inconceivable and absolutely impossible." (p. 77) The philosopher Edmund Husserl, the man who made famous the term "phenomenology," also made famous another term: intentionality. Intentionality states that all thought is thought about something. When I think, I think about what I want to do later, or what I just read, or even what I was just thinking about. Thought without content is literally impossible, for then it is no longer thought.
The same can be said about nothing. Thinking about nothing is impossible, because there is nothing to be thought of. Kant is aware of this. However, when we try to apply nothing in an argument or in language generally, we have problems. Just like our thought is about things, our words are about things. To talk about 'nothing' is to treat it like a thing, which is exactly wrong. It may be inconceivable to discuss nothing, but that only means that our minds cannot conceive of it, not that it doesn't exist. So when we say that nothing is impossible because it eliminates possibility, it is true, but for the wrong reason. It is true because it is a tautology, because nothing isn't any thing. But 'nothing' cannot be put into our equation of possibility, because it does not have the 'thing' status that logic requires. (Think of it like this: we indicate the absence of something in logic by saying, "not A", or ~A. But that makes a specific reference to a thing, A. We can't say 'not anything' in logic, because we have to have a reference. Kant recognizes this as well, but does not take it anywhere.)
In the sense of the argument, then, to say that nothing is impossible is not useful. Yet to argue for a divine being it is necessary to say that nothing cannot be, for otherwise our equation could be left with a hole and something would be necessary to complete it and explain the possibility of things. Hence, necessary being. But if the argument is limited by our own understanding (as we have seen), the problem could be elsewhere. The sceptic is not impressed.
"[S]omething may be absolutely necessary either when through its opposite the formal element of all conceivability is annulled, that is, when it contradicts itself; or when its non-being annuls the material element for all thought and all data for it." (p. 77) In other words, necessity depends on our ability to conceive of it, as though denial of logic and understanding would make the world blink out. It is in this wise that Kant is still a man of his times: he holds, like all others around him, that the world can essentially be understood by man, that laws which organize that world are there, that they fit into logical conformity and can in such way be understood. Thus he was still the classicist and, in that wise, the dogmatist. If someone can shock him out of this with a thorough and damaging attack on human reason, he might have to change his tune. Well, that person came. His name was David Hume, and he was a sceptic par excellence. And instead of hiding behind ideas of common sense and dogmatism, Kant decided to engage scepticism head on. He became Kant the critic, and decided the only right path would be an appraisal of the human capacity for understanding. In other words, a Critique of Pure Reason.
-----
Coming up: You know it. You fear it. It's the Critique of Pure Reason.
posted by Derek at 4:59 PM
2 Comments:
"Coming up: You know it. You fear it. It's the Critique of Pure Reason."
I've also read it and forgotten it. For whatever reason, it didn't stick with me.
1) Things are possible.
2) For things to be possible, not only must there be no contradiction, but both the start and endpoints must be conceivable.
3) There cannot be nothing as one part or the other of the relation.
4) Thus possibility itself depends upon something actual.
5) Thus a necessary being must exist.
What I find interesting about this version of the ontological argument is that it is somewhat similar to Descartes's second ontological argument, often overlooked in his Meditations in favor of this first. It is predicated on the concept that more cannot come from less; that the whole is never greater than the sum of its parts.
1. I clearly and distinctly perceive the possibility of a perfect being.
2. I am not a perfect being.
3. More cannot come from less.
4. Thus I am not the cause of my clear and distinct perception of the possibility of a perfect being.
5. Moreover, the only possible cause of such a clear and distinct perception is a perfect being.
6. Thus a perfect being exists.
Premise 3 is, of course, wrong. Like almost all pre-Darwinian thinkers, Descartes falsely assumed that causation is always top-down, with the most complex thing causing less complex things.
The 'top-down' principle is not always false though. It is true in many specific instances. After all, our complex brains create simple tools all the time. In Kant's version, he distills the "more cannot come from less" principle into a specific: something cannot be predicated on nothing. If I understand what your wrote correctly, he added that nothing cannot be predicated on something, which allows him to conclude the existence of a necessary being.
That's very clever, but has one obvious disadvantage - 'necessary' is far shy of 'perfect'. The necessary thing ('being' even goes a bit far) may not be perfect. It may not be personal. It may not even be all that complex. All he's done is 'proven' that something exists, not that God exists, as most people understand the term.
I think where Kant would look back on his argument and find fault is from thinking that a purely a priori argument could prove the existence of anything. In the critique he will explicitly deny this view. It can indicate necessary logical features of the world. Two of these are that nothing is not something conceivable, and that every effect must have a cause. His view of possibility is also a priori, as something that has two distinct points. But that doesn't indicate what is actually real, though it may tell us what we need in order to understand it. Yet our understanding is not the end-all of everything. In the Critique he takes a much more careful view in regarding what we can and cannot know, and for the most part he seems to do extremely well (I'm about 1/3 of the way through). One can't take concepts like 'possibility' and 'nothing' and simply translate them into the world of existing things. They're more parts of our understanding than any thing. But more of that when I get to it. Speaking of which...
"I've also read it and forgotten it. For whatever reason, it didn't stick with me."
That's probably because it's one of the densest, most technical, most difficult books I've ever seen, and this stuff is my life. I get through at an average of eight to ten pages per hour, as opposed to about twenty to thirty for any other piece of philosophy. Needless to say, it's going to be a little while.
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