Kant’s No To Metaphysics Is No To God

By Gary L. Morella

In 1756, Kant read Hume in a German translation, and as soon as he began to realize the meaning of Hume’s skepticism, his own faith in the validity of metaphysical knowledge was badly shaken. "David Hume", Kant was to write many years later in his Prolegomena, first broke my dogmatic slumber." Hume’s critical observations on the principle of causality, generalized and extended by Kant to the whole body of metaphysics, brought him to the conclusion that, as positive knowledge, metaphysics was dead. The first page of the first preface to the Critique of Pure Reason takes it as an obvious and accomplished fact, which stands in no need of demonstration: "There was a time when metaphysic held a royal place among all the sciences . . . At present, it is the fashion to despise metaphysic, and the poor matron, forlorn and forsaken, complains like Hecuba: ‘But late on the pinnacle of fame, strong in my many sons, my daughters and my husband, I am now dragged away, penniless, exiled.’" [See fn 1. in Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience, The Physicism of Kant with the quote from Ovid, Metamorphoses, XIII, 506.]

What defines science as a specific ideal of human knowledge is self-criticism. Perceiving as true what can be demonstrated, science dismisses all the rest as idle speculation, with the twofold result that it’s always progressing, and always respected. This isn’t the case with metaphysics, ethics, or religion, which command our respect as a function of the importance of the subjects with which they deal as opposed to the evidence of their conclusions. Kant didn’t see it this way. The time had come when men could no longer feel interested in any discipline for the sublimity of its ambitions, for the pure joy of speculative contemplation, but only for the soundness of demonstrations ala mathematical empiricism ushered in by the likes of Newton. "Our age is, in every sense of the word, the age of criticism," Kant concludes, "and everything must submit to it. Religion, on the strength of its sanctity, and law, on the strength of it majesty, try to withdraw themselves from it; but by so doing they arouse just suspicions, and cannot claim that sincere respect which reason pays to those only who have been able to stand its free and open examination" [Ibid].

Kant observed that though the application of mathematics be highly desirable wherever it’s possible, the imitation of mathematics as a method of reasoning is very dangerous when tried in cases in which it’s impossible to use it. Philosophy and, especially metaphysics happen to fall into that category. The object of mathematics is simple being quantitative; the object of metaphysics is manifold and infinitely varied being qualitative.

By substituting empirical observation for abstract definitions as the first stage of philosophical knowledge, Kant wasn’t shifting from mathematics to philosophy, but from mathematics to physics. He concluded: "The true method of metaphysics is fundamentally the same as that which Newton has introduced into natural science, and which has there yielded such fruitful results" [Ibid]. In saying this, Kant proceeded to cross a line beyond which no metaphysics can survive. A new standard science had been appointed the supreme judge of philosophy. But metaphysics is no more capable of physical than of mathematical rigor or demonstration. Thus, in conscience, the verdict of its new judge was de facto condemnation.

The Critique of Pure Reason describes what the structure of the human mind should be in order to account for the existence of a Newtonian conception of nature, and assuming that conception to be true. Nothing can show more clearly the essential weakness of physicism as a philosophical method. The pure reason described by Kant could last no longer than the Newtonian physics, which it was its proper function to justify. Newton considered the existence of an absolute space and an absolute time as necessarily required by his physics. [See Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World]. As a result, Kant decreed that man should be credited with two forms of sensible intuition; space and time, in which all the objects of knowledge are given to the understanding. So long as our mind applies itself to objects thus given, it can form a scientifically valid knowledge. If, on the other hand, it applies itself to mere mental presentations of possible objects in a contemplative sense, what an algebraic topologist might consider a "thought experiment", it doesn’t form concepts of things, but mere ideas. Since these ideas have no objects, they don’t constitute a scientific knowledge but rather an illusory speculation that is called metaphysics.

Kant says that man has both sensibility and understanding with sensibility itself immediately perceiving given reality through two a priori forms – space and time. The forms are called a priori because we don’t derive them from things, but impose them on things. The forms of our knowledge of reality make it an object of knowledge, and are thus also the forms of experience itself. Our understanding is also equipped with a priori principles like the notions of substance, or of causality, by which it connects the various objects given to us in space and time. These principles of understanding aren’t derived from things anymore than are space and time. As Kant says, they are transcendent with respect to things; they aren’t drawn from experience but rather they make it. Kant says we have to be careful here with this very property of the principles of understanding, being the condition of all sensible experience, giving rise to dangerous illusions. As they can deal with really perceived objects, so can they deal also with our concepts of things, as if those concepts were themselves real things, which they aren’t. The transcendental nature of the principles of understanding becomes the source of what Kant calls a transcendental illusion because, instead of connecting real objects together by means of concepts, we are doing so via abstract ideas while still believing that we’re dealing with things. It’s a transcendental illusion because its very possibility is due to the fact that the principles of human understanding aren’t borrowed from any particular objects, but transcendent with respect to all possible objects. When applied to sensible intuitions, these principles give birth to scientific knowledge, which is the proper work of understanding; when applied to scientific concepts, they give rise to abstract ideas, and metaphysics, which is the proper work of reason. Metaphysics, then, devoid of concrete objects is both necessary and empty. It’s necessary because we can’t stop our understanding or prevent it from thinking in a vacuum; converted to reason, it will prove everything making it empty, i.e., there is no God, and there is a God; there is no soul, and there is a soul; the world has unity, and the world has no unity. All are possible, which shows the futility of metaphysics. As soon as the principles of understanding transcend all the limits of experience, and withdraw themselves from all empirical tests, reason becomes the battlefield of these endless controversies called metaphysics.

In retracing Kant’s thought through his Prolegomena from Hume’s wakeup call from "dogmatic slumber" we see that, by generalizing on Hume’s observation concerning the principle of causality, Kant concluded that scientific knowledge would be absolutely impossible unless such principles were considered not as derived from experience, Hume’s mistake, but as originating in pure understanding. By shifting from experience to the intellectual conditions of experience, Kant hoped to achieve a threefold result: first, to rescue science from skepticism; secondly, to rid metaphysics of any pretense of objective knowledge; and thirdly, to make it clear metaphysics was an inevitable illusion.

Suffice to say that though Kant followed Locke and Hume in holding that all of our knowledge "arises from" experience, he departed from them in arguing that any universality and necessity found in such knowledge must be put there by our own knowing processes. This led him to make his famous distinction between phenomena and noumena – the latter the "intelligibles" hitherto regarded as the proper object of the intellect. Kant proposed that the phenomena, or the appearances of things, can be used to attain valid knowledge, whereas the noumena, or "things-in-themselves," are forever inaccessible to human reason. Once his solution was accepted, natural philosophy as traditionally understood became impossible and science inherited the only task that was left, that, namely of collecting data and analyzing phenomena as these present themselves in human experience.

The modern mind owes mainly to Descartes and Kant the present-day distinction between natural philosophy and science. From them it also received certain fundamental principles that underlie, either explicitly or implicitly, most present-day philosophies of science. The first is that the clear and distinct idea is the criterion of truth; acceptance of this view entails a view of science that is essentially mathematical. A second principle is that there can be no knowledge of things-in-themselves, i.e., of natures or essences. Consequently, most philosophers of science profess a basic agnosticism concerning man’s ability to know reality in anything but a superficial way. A third principle, most influential with positivists and empiricists, is that all human knowledge must begin in the senses and is ultimately incapable of transcending the sensible. Such being the case, metaphysics is a "transcendental illusion" and any consideration of God, immortality (the soul), and free will can lead only to ultimate contradictions. "Legitimate" knowledge of the real world is reached, moreover, restricted to the "secure path of science," the path already charted by Newton’s mathematical physics (mechanics). What remains for philosophy is simply that of accounting for such systematizations as is presently found in mathematics and physics with classical metaphysics destined for the trash bin of history.

Gilson tells us in Modern Philosophy Descartes to Kant that the three general ideas of reason grow out of the correspondence between the three forms of syllogistic reasoning (categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive) with the categories of relation (substance, cause, and community). Reason, in seeking the unconditioned principle of categorical reasoning, posits the unity of substance as the thinking subject, i.e., the soul; it seeks the absolute principle underlying hypothetical reasoning in the totality of the causal series of appearances, i.e., the idea of the world; and that of disjunctive reasoning, in the unity of all perfections, i.e., God. The attribution of a real existence to these objects produced by the mind for its own satisfaction is Kant’s "transcendental illusion" synonymous with metaphysics. The climatic part of the critique, the "Dialectic," is to expose this "natural illusion," and thus to unseat the pretensions of the three branches of traditional philosophy that grow from the abuse of these three transcendent ideas: rational psychology, based on the transcendent use of the pure idea of the soul; rational cosmology, based on that of the world; and rational theology, based on the idea of God. For all of these, Kant wants to eliminate the aforementioned contradictory conclusions in a classic metaphysical context in the easiest way possible, by eliminating classical metaphysics. The idea of God meets the same fate as the idea of soul-substance in Kant’s resounding NO to metaphysics, i.e., reason cannot demonstrate God’s existence, but neither can it demonstrate the contrary. Rather, as it had for the soul, reason in the critique has prepared a place for God, but that place remains experientially unfilled. Once and for all, dogmatic metaphysics has been put in its place.

In summary, Kant reacting against the skepticism of Hume, endeavored to save the validity of scientific knowledge. But he also accepted Descartes’s theory of knowledge and came to the conclusion that reality as it exists outside the mind, the "noumenon" as he called it, can’t be known by the speculative reason. God, he maintained, can be attained only by the practical reason, as the guarantor of the moral order, in particular, the concept of God, regardless of whether He exists or not.

Father Stanley Jaki in Miracles and Physics, points out that Kant staked his reputation on his critique of the cosmological argument for the existence of God. The point was that science (the science of Kant’s time) provided no contradiction-free account of the universe. This is why Kant felt entitled to call the notion of the universe a bastard product of the metaphysical cravings of the intellect and, therefore, unsuitable to serve as the final and crucial jumping board in the intellectual recognition of the existence of the Creator. [See Jaki, The Road of Science.] This objection of Kant, as Jaki observes, continues to command credibility only on the part of those unmindful of Einstein’s achievement, which should, however, loom large in the eyes of those hopeful about a genuine harmony between science and miracles. The latter can be part of rational discourse only if the existence of the Creator and of a moral order (inconceivable without Him) are assumed. Einstein’s contribution to the scientific grasp of the universe should seem therefore of greatest importance. In fact he perceived late in his life that his cosmology may be an unintended pointer to the One beyond the totality of consistently interacting things, which is the universe. [See Einstein’s exchange of letters with M. Solovine in 1950-51.]

Father George Rutler in Christ and Reason gives us a glimpse of the modernist legacy of Kant when he described Kant’s God as transcendent to the point of inaccessibility, the antinomy of realms could only be resolved in derivative Kantian thought, if not by a return to fideism, then by pantheism or the utter transmutation of God into the immanent force of history, or maybe even the immanent "force" of George Lukas’s Star War sagas. In either naturalistic case, supernatural agency evaporates. This has already happened when, in Rutler’s words, "Kant had denuded his remnant pietism of what sacramental allusions it had inherited from scholasticism." We’re left with a concept of God Who is nothing more than a stark "moral governor" and "Supreme Legislator" who was hardly the God of the Law and quite definitely a deification of the Law. Instead of saying "I will not serve," Kantianism says, "I will serve" and then serves the self. And throughout all of this modernist philosophical tortured discourse akin to self-flagellation, we thought that we were getting further away from the selfishness of Hobbes. We better look again, especially at the god we primarily worship, the one in our mirrors.