Kant thus admitted that there are analytic a priori judgments, propositions that are analytically true, and he allowed for synthetic a posteriori judgments, empirical propositions known on the basis of experience alone. He denied that analytic a priori judgments exist, and was thus left with the question of the synthetic a priori. The results of the Critique are that the traditional synthetic a priori judgments of metaphysics are unwarranted, but that the synthetic a priori judgments appearing in geometry and arithmetic are permissible.
I remember being troubled the first time I read The Crique of Pure Reason by the transcendental analysis he undertakes. He is writing a book, after all, that is making claims about the transcendental structure of things, a book seemingly claiming a transcends structure that might be known. Clearly, this knowledge is neither empirical knowledge constituted by synthetic a posteriori judgments, nor is this knowledge merely dealing with the conceptual, that is, the results of analytic a priori judgments. So what is this knowledge? Prima facie, Kant believes these transcendental structures hold, that he (and we) are justified in holding they exist -- he speaks often of the warrant for his claims about the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience as such -- and that we should believe they obtain.
Knowledge of the existence and structure of the transcendental unity of apperception must be a matter of synthetic a priori propositions, I thought, but this seems incorrect, because Kant had just proved that synthetic a priori judgments are legitimate only in the fields of arithmetic and geometry, and the structure of the transcendental unity of apperception is neither a matter of arithmetic or geometry. So what is it? Clearly, it is not traditional metaphysics either. Kant spends much ink in showing that traditional metaphysics dealing with the transcendent is bankrupt because it employs synthetic a priori judgments beyond the realm of possible experience. It is clear that the transcendental structure Kant explores is prior to the transcendent, for it is through his exploration of the transcendental that we are warranted in drawing the limits of the synthetic a priori.
German philosophy after Kant clearly understood the great philosopher's critique of metaphysics, but also grasped the transcendental conditions for the possibility of this critique. Kant knew that there was no warrant to claim that the "I" was a substance as Descartes had supposed. But his transcendental investigation had indeed uncovered the presence of a transcendental unity of apperception, a unity of experience that was not an experience of unity as Descartes had thought. So what is the ontological nature of this transcendental unity that is not a unity within the transcendent? How can we know it? What language can speak about it?
Questions of epistemology, ontology and semantics arise immediately with regard to putative transcendental structures. The German Idealists strove mightily to bring into focus the dynamism of the transcendental. Hegel's critique of Shelling was based not upon which philosophical system was more felicitous, but rather on which was true. It is clear to anybody reading Hegel that he is making truth claims, claims that are presupposed in his treatment of absolute knowledge. Obviously, these claims cannot be divorced from questions of being and meaning.
The problem of knowing transcendental structures involves self-reference because it is an act within the transcendental unity of apperception to know that transcendental unity. The phenomenologists were also acutely aware of the problem of intending structures of consciousness that are utilized in intentionality itself. Although the 20th century positivist tradition attempted to leave behind these problems of self-reference by limiting knowledge to the positive sciences, their attempt to limit such knowledge to these sciences clearly was not something that could be known factually through these sciences. In divers and sundry ways, the intellectual tradition, since the days of Descartes, has had to do with paradox. We might say that the paradox of self-reference has been at the center of all the paradoci generated by the Enlightenment: After all, how is it possible to know X, when knowing X seems ultimately to rest upon what X is? Simply put, what is the epistemic and ontological status of the form of thinking, when that form seems to deal with the very matter of thinking.
The German tradition understood that the Geisteswissenschaften differ from the Naturwissenschaften. While in the latter, we can safely assume that the thinking form independently grasps (and structures) the matter of the thing thought, in the former the grasping is of that which itself grasps; it is a grasping through forms that it itself is! It is nature of spirit to relate itself to itself in these ways. When grasping what is the nature of human being, human be-ing is involved in the grasping. Martin Heidegger famously spoke of Dasein -- which includes human be-ing -- as that being, who in its be-ing, has be-ing at issue for it. There is no view from the outside when it comes to examining the basic structure of human be-ing, for asking the question belongs to the basic structure of human be-ing. Any asking of the ontological question is immanent to the ontology of the questioner.
So it is that we talk about the spirit that constitutes human be-ing. It is the nature of this spirit to question and seek to know about itself. To know who we are means to know the one who seeks to know who we are. To know ourselves is to know ourselves in the process of knowing ourselves, and knowing our knowing of ourselves. This knowing of ourselves as the knowers of ourselves constitutes the spirit that is us. Aristotle conceived God as thought thinking itself. Human beings are beings who are be-ing in their relationship to their own be-ing. It is the nature of spirit to be itself subjectively when relating to itself objectively. Spirit in-itself is being ultimately in-itself when spirit is being for-itself, that is, spirit is that relation between subject and object that can neither be described either as subject or object. Spirit in-itself takes up the subjective spirit in-itself and the objective spirit for-itself. Hegel was clearly not wrong on any of this, if we have the perseverance and patience to think what he thought.
So if the paradox of self-reference pushes towards human beings being spirit, trinunely constituted as beings forever what they are in relationship to what they are in-itself and for-itself, then why would we think God to be otherwise? It is the nature of the Triune God to relate Himself to what God is in Himself and how God expresses Himself as other than that self. We use the word "Spirit" to talk about the life of God, a life forever relating God to God. Divine knowledge involves the same dialectics of self-reference that confronts human beings. God is God in relating God to God. We are who we are in relation to ourselves. We know ourselves dynamically as we find ourselves in that which is other than ourselves. God too finds His full divine life in relating to that which is other than God.
There is much here about which to be careful in its saying because I do not want to fall victim to the historical heresies in thinking or speaking God. However, it is clear that the life of both human beings and the divine is a spiritual life, and that these parallel lives have something to do with the problem of self-reference: Where can one find a position outside of the life of God or human beings from which to describe the life of God or human beings? Any attempt to find that position outside of the life from which to describe the life is an illusion, a fallacy of aseity. Such a fallacy ignores the paradox of self-reference. Gods and human beings have a similar spiritual structure. To grasp them as objects means not to so grasp them. Both are objects, whose being it is to be subjects forever related to themselves objectively.
Given that human beings are spiritual beings, and the God they seek has spiritual divine life, how might it be that God and human being might relate to each other? Clearly, the answer is that the relationship is a spiritual one. While human beings in their be-ing can have their own be-ing at issue for them, they cannot in their own being have divine be-ing at issue for them. The life of God cannot be reflected in human spiritual life without human spiritual life being gifted with a new subjective standpoint, a subjectivity that is provided different capabilities, a subjectivity that can now grasp (however obliquely) the objectivity of God -- not a human projection or chimera -- a subjectivity that is a divine subjectivity gifted to human beings. Human access to God demands the elevation of standpoint that is best characterized as a human participation in the life of God.
The deepest paradox of human life is that the standpoint we must employ in the grasping of our lives is always underdetermined by the life we grasp. In this position, there could never be hope that human beings might relate to God. But as the theological tradition has always taught, it is God's Spirit that constitutes the conditions for human beings to relate to God. Clearly, as Luther said, "it is not by our own reason or strength that we might believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and come to him . . . "
This is an excellent analysis, Dennis. I wish you would say more about the fallacy of the aseity since it is parallel to my own concerns about the fallacy of abstract simplicity. In any case you are right to see how Hegel is trying to overcome the Kantian conceit of denying the transcendent by an unwarranted knowledge of the transcendental conditions for the possibility of knowledge. I think the problem with Hegel is different than with Kant. In short, the notion of spirit constitute a metaphysical continuum, just as being had done in ontotheology, in which creator and creature are equally embraced and thus subordinated to a category. You recognize this when you caution that you don't want to fall into the historical heresies. And certainly the conclusion that you come to about divine apocalypse as the actual condition for the possibility of spiritual knowledge of God by the gift of the divine Spirit leads in the same direction.
ReplyDeleteSo I think the problems with Hegel can be addressed in a twofold fashion. As you write about Hegel's quasi-trinitarianism: “God too finds His full divine life in relating to that which is other than God.” Well, yes and no. The Father finds his full divine life in generating his Son upon whom he breathes his Spirit, so that in the Spirit the Son returns the glory to the Father which is his due. The inability to speak of God except generically as “God” consistently undermines New Testament gospel discourse of God as the event of the life of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, an event which eternally obtains and becomes event for creatures in the gospel of Christ. The way to protect a genuinely theological aseity so that God's love is not necessitated by a lack in God’s being but by an abundance of interpersonal love is to distinguish but not separate the eternal and the economic Trinity. This leads to a positive rather than the negative dialectic of Hegel, i.e. with Athanasius to ask what was God in his goodness to do? For Hegel however God is essentially creative, that is, cannot be God without creating something other, indeed emptying himself into something other. But for trinitarianism (so the great book by TF Torrance) God is not creator but becomes creator in the freedom of his love.
One last thought: Hegel stands at the apex of the Cartesian turn to the subject of modern philosophy with his analysis of the historical nature of self-consciousness, in itself an interesting achievement. But it bears the dualistic trace of its genesis: the kind of categorical differentiation of spirit from nature which Hegel in fact identified and rejected in Kant and Fichte and sought to mitigate. But I think contemporary dialogue of theology with science would lead us in a very different direction to extend the ontology of relation away from the ontology of act to a theology of nature which sees being as communion all the way down and all the way up, an image of, not an identity with, the triune God and Creator.
I sit at my computer preparing to type a response. In doing so, I attend to the screen, the touch of my fingers on the keypad, then forgetting them to attend to the thoughts that find their ways encrypted on the screen. Drawing back, I see myself sitting on a chair, as one typing in a small room upstairs, with a damp, cold show of winter about the land, now raked clean of summer's harvest, with the unseen hosts of men and women about their business, that for generations have somehow come to this place and time. I am all of these and more. And yet where am I? I, the time traveler, the receder, drawing back and returning again. Is there a place, a resting place, to see it all, to include it all, and still be or have an I. The I, some place from which to see, is always and ever unseen, always behind on the other side, the dark side.
ReplyDeleteWhen I see the tree outside my window, I see but from one perspective. I see but one side, and yet I don't apperceive the tree as one-sided. I see what cannot be seen from here. Indeed, cannot be seen from anywhere. Merleau-Ponty speaks of anonymous co-perceivers, as if in my one-sided seeing, I share in those infinity of perceivers who see the tree from all its sides at the same time that I do. I hereby receive the intuition that there are or could be an infinity of co-perceivers and the mere possibility of that number conveys to me that the tree is not what I alone perceive, but what we all perceive. In doing so, I pronounce my own one-sided perceiving to be an illusion. I renounce my ownness, my aloneness, and in so doing I come to live in a world in which I inhabit, in which I am a part of, although I cannot from my I alone in its one-sidedness see this to be the case. Without this, without the perspectives of countless unseen perceivers, the world would lack independence of being. It would be as if I light up the world, instead the world lighting up and illuminating me.
What this suggests is that I alone cannot make enduring objects of the world. I require not-I to do so, and this begins to address the withdrawal and receding of perspectives. As long as I try to accomplish this alone, I will fail and, as failing, we also fail to make an objective world in which to dwell. But what of these countless anonymous observers? Where are they? I cannot see or count them. They are simply always there, silent and invisible, giving substance to the world and my continued being, what endures and constitutes me and all that I can see and not see, for I know myself to be too small and inattentive to do so.
They are the gaze of God that I cannot see, but can always feel in the background that must remain unspoken in the background that makes a foreground possible. It is like knowing that I have a backside, the side never seen or touched. It is not like knowing that I am typing right now. It silently goes unspoken, but always there. What kind of knowing and feeling is that? It is as if the entire world bears witness to it without saying so.
This is the place that Christ beckons us unto, a place where we love but are not lovers, where we judge but are not judgers. It is an I that is located in the heart of God, where there is no I, or perhaps another kind of I, one qualitatively different from the I of here and now.
I sit at my computer preparing to type a response. In doing so, I attend to the screen, the touch of my fingers on the keypad, then forgetting them to attend to the thoughts that find their ways encrypted on the screen. Drawing back, I see myself sitting on a chair, as one typing in a small room upstairs, with a damp, cold show of winter about the land, now raked clean of summer's harvest, with the unseen hosts of men and women about their business, that for generations have somehow come to this place and time. I am all of these and more. And yet where am I? I, the time traveler, the receder, drawing back and returning again. Is there a place, a resting place, to see it all, to include it all, and still be or have an I. The I, some place from which to see, is always and ever unseen, always behind on the other side, the dark side.
ReplyDeleteWhen I see the tree outside my window, I see but from one perspective. I see but one side, and yet I don't apperceive the tree as one-sided. I see what cannot be seen from here. Indeed, cannot be seen from anywhere. Merleau-Ponty speaks of anonymous co-perceivers, as if in my one-sided seeing, I share in those infinity of perceivers who see the tree from all its sides at the same time that I do. I hereby receive the intuition that there are or could be an infinity of co-perceivers and the mere possibility of that number conveys to me that the tree is not what I alone perceive, but what we all perceive. In doing so, I pronounce my own one-sided perceiving to be an illusion. I renounce my ownness, my aloneness, and in so doing I come to live in a world in which I inhabit, in which I am a part of, although I cannot from my I alone in its one-sidedness see this to be the case. Without this, without the perspectives of countless unseen perceivers, the world would lack independence of being. It would be as if I light up the world, instead the world lighting up and illuminating me.
What this suggests is that I alone cannot make enduring objects of the world. I require not-I to do so, and this begins to address the withdrawal and receding of perspectives. As long as I try to accomplish this alone, I will fail and, as failing, we also fail to make an objective world in which to dwell. But what of these countless anonymous observers? Where are they? I cannot see or count them. They are simply always there, silent and invisible, giving substance to the world and my continued being, what endures and constitutes me and all that I can see and not see, for I know myself to be too small and inattentive to do so.
They are the gaze of God that I cannot see, but can always feel in the background that must remain unspoken in the background that makes a foreground possible. It is like knowing that I have a backside, the side never seen or touched. It is not like knowing that I am typing right now. It silently goes unspoken, but always there. What kind of knowing and feeling is that? It is as if the entire world bears witness to it without saying so.
This is the place that Christ beckons us unto, a place where we love but are not lovers, where we judge but are not judgers. It is an I that is located in the heart of God, where there is no I, or perhaps another kind of I, one qualitatively different from the I of here and now.