Transcendental Self-Reference, Spirit and God

I remember distinctly my first reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. I had learned about the semantic distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments, and the epistemological distinction between a priori and a posteriori judgments. Kant famously asked in the Critique about the legitimacy of synthetic a priori judgments, that is, judgments that are not dependent upon empirical experience in which, nevertheless, the meaning of the predicate is not included in the meaning of the subject. Traditional metaphysics consists in such synthetic a priori judgments, and for a host of reasons, Kant concludes that traditional metaphysics built on synthetic a priori judgments is wholly dubious. No amount of thinking things through conceptually can add to knowledge. For knowledge to occur, intuitions (that which is given through sensibility) are necessary. Kant does argue, however, that geometry and arithmetic has recourse to the pure forms of intuition, i.e., space and time, and that both are justified as synthetic a priori endeavors. 

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 . . . "

Thinking Truth Non-Propositionally

"I am the Way and the Truth and the Life."

I regard the statement as true.  As such, it is a  propositional truth.   Precisely how a  statement is a propositional truth is a matter of considerable debate, of course.   Some say it is true because regarding it so issues in desirable effects.  "Truth is what works," declares the confident pragmatist.

Others say it is true because it coheres appropriately with a wider class of statements.  It is consistent  with them, and it, and the wider class of statements, mutually presuppose each other so that there are no arbitrary and disconnected statements from which the statement is deducible.   Getting clear on the coherence theory of truth is never easy because it is not perspicuous what the precise boundaries of coherence are.  

Many say that the statement is propositionally true because it appropriately states what is the case.   Getting precision on what is the case apart from the statement, and what the appropriate way is in which the statement and the extra-linguistic states of affairs relate, is not altogether facile.  What constitutes the criterion by which to adjudicate when a statement appropriately states the case?  If there is an isomorphism between statement and the reality it depicts?  If so, what are the relata of the relations isomorphically obtaining?

In the absence of clear criteria which unfailingly picks out the truth of a putative propositional truth, some claim that the truth of propositional truth is primitive.  One need not have some elaborate theory of meaning which, when appropriately satisfied, delivers truth.   One could start with truth and discern that  meaning in some way is derivative upon that.

Whatever be one's theory, the notion that truth is propositional is standard fare in philosophical thinking.   A philosopher can give alternative accounts of how the truth of "I am the Way and the Truth and the Life" is true.  This much is certain.   But the philosopher runs into a brick wall when trying to think the content of the proposition in which  utterer is identified with Truth itself.  What could this mean?   How could truth be non-propositional?   How can truth be non-linguistic?  What does it mean to say that 'Jesus' is 'Truth'?

One might at this point say that 'truth' just means 'reality', and that Jesus is thus 'real'.   But this way of proceeding is fraught with much difficulty because to say 'Jesus is Truth' is clearly intended to say more than 'Jesus is real', for one would quite glibly say 'the ball is real', but never aver 'the ball is truth'.

There are two more promising steps forward, one Hegelian and one Heideggerian.   Hegel famously claimed, "Diese Gegenstaende sind wahr, wenn sie das sind, was sie sein sollen, d.h. wenn ihre Realitaet ihrem Begriff entspricht" ("Objects are true if they are as they ought to be, that is, when their reality corresponds to their notion."). [Enzyklopaedie, Wissenschaft der Logik (1830), 213, n. 127] Accordingly, Jesus is 'truth' in that he corresponds fully to the concept of what it is to be the God-man.  But is this "correspondence" really non-propositional?   Think what it would be to specify how a thing corresponds without using concepts expressible in language.  How could one thing not be another thing in the absence of that which differentiates?   And how can that which differentiates not finally be expressible in language?

Another way forward is Heideggerian.  Famously Heidegger argued that alethia (truth) is a unconcealing (Unverborgenheit) or as an Entbergung or "unveiling."   Early on Heidegger found the phenomenon of unveiling as the ontological ground for the possibility of truth.  However, later Heidegger admitted that die Frage nach der Unverborgenheit als solcher ist nicht die Frage nach die Wahrheit.  (Maybe he realized that if truth needed an ontological ground in unconcealing, falsity needed one in concealing.)   Whatever might be thought of Heidegger's turn away from truth as unconcealing in his Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens, he remained convinced that truth had something to do with correctness, and that correctness had everything to do with unveiling.  But how can one claim that the experience of unveiling ontologically grounds truth when this experience could as easily be described as truth's effect?

Given what has been said, how is it unquestionably possible for Jesus to be 'the Truth'?   Moreover, if Jesus is identified with God's self-revelation, then how can that revelation be true?   The standard move here is to distinguish between the objective, historical process of revelation and the subjective interpretation of that revelation.  (One might claim a la Pannenberg that a distinction holds between the "outer revelation" and the "inspiration" as the interpretation of these events in the Biblical witnesses.)  While the first is putatively non-propositional, the second is not.  But what is it to be a manifestation of God in and through historical events, that is, in and through particular things?  Furthermore, how could such a manifestation be non-linguistic?  If Stacia is a "true friend," but Bob is not, then what is it about Stacia that distinguishes her over and against Bob; what is that "it" that is not in principle capturable by language?

Twentieth century theology, in its effort to escape the "propositional theory of truth" with respect to divine revelation - - the generally-regarded spurious claim that divine revelation is an impartation of information -- seems to lurch into a semantic crevasse of vanquished lucidity.   Simply put, one  does not know what one is talking about when discoursing about a revelation that is in principle non-propositional.   That God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself could, after all, be true, but what is true is the fact that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.  A revelation that cannot be expressed as fact is finally too amorphous to be revelatory; such a revelation is ultimately a night in which all cows are black.  

Thinking Hegelian Thoughts

It can happen to you anywhere, and sometimes with the least provocation. You can be having a good day, a clear day, a day when you know what you know and what you should do. It can be a day of teaching, of administrating, or of reading and studying. It can be a day like other good days. . . But then it happens: Suddenly, capriciously Hegel makes sense.

Now I don’t mean to say that one suddenly grasps the system, that one comes to clarity about how mediated immediacy works with respect to the whole of ideal and historical reality, or even that one succeeds in actually learning something more about Hegel’s thought. It is not really a greater appreciation of Hegel that one has, but rather that all of a sudden, and quite out of the blue, one discovers one is Hegelian; one grasps that what Hegel says is deeply true.

My own recent insightful moment occurred on a day like other days. I was lecturing on the problems bequeathed by Kant and was talking about how Fichte, Schelling and Hegel responded to these problems. I was talking about how, for Kant, the forms imposed by the subject on things were due to our autonomous transcendental synthesizing activity, and that Hegel believed that Kant had allowed that the particularity of the forms so imposed was ultimately inexplicable, or, in Hegel’s terms, “shot from the pistol.” Famously, Hegel had accused Kant of allowing these forms to stand in “bare externality,” and that what was thus needed was a way to show how this “moment” was itself the result of some higher movement of the Spirit, or some more lofty unpacking of the Idea. (At this point undergraduate students are generally thinking about something fun they shall be doing in the summer.) On this recent day in class, I appealed to Hegel’s implicit presupposition of the Principle of Sufficient Reason in explaining why Hegel could not leave the forms in mere bare externality and, I must admit, I was even a little proud in showing how Hegel was thusly continuing in the German rationalist tradition. But then it happened: Hegel’s solution simply seemed inescapable! Of course, one cannot merely leave the Kantian subject in externality; one must finally “take it up” in the higher movement of Spirit. If one does not do so, one is guilty of hanging the Kantian subject out to dry in the arena of the irrational; one is, in other words, condemning the Kantian subject to the abyss of Value.

The story goes like this: For many philosophers prior to Kant, the world is merely given; it is thus the subject’s obligation to conform itself to the objective structure of the world. But the skeptical trajectory culminating in Hume had shown how the objectivity of the natural sciences could not be maintained without a move to the subject. In order to ground the objectivity of experience, Kant deduced those necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. These included, as is well known, the pure a priori forms of intuition (space and time), and the pure a priori forms of understanding (quantity, quality, relation, and modality). Of these, the two most famous fall under ‘relation’, the pure a priori concepts of substance and cause. Since philosophers had shown that substance and causality were not part of the structure of the world in itself, they must be located elsewhere if they are to be retained. Kant famously located them in the autonomy of the transcendental synthesis that gives rise to the self/world structure. It is because human being in its transcendental be-ing, imposes form upon the world, that human being in its subjective be-ing can come to know the world as a formed content. Kant showed, in effect, that since the necessary forms employed in modern science could not be derived from the content of the world in itself, that they must be grounded in the synthesizing activity of the subject. The transcendental condition for the possibility of a formed world was not a world that came as formed, but a synthesis that imposed the form of the subject upon a formless world. (Theologically, one could say that without the Word there could be no World.) So Kant did not allow the world to stand in its immediacy, but rather showed that all knowledge of the world demanded a mediacy by the subject.

Now enter the heroic Hegelian solution: Instead of leaving the transcendental condition for the possibility of a formed world to be just the way things are (“shot from the pistol”), Hegel showed how this transcendental synthesizing activity was itself accounted for by the movement of Geist (Spirit) that is, by definition, no longer something that needs accounting for. Whereas the content of the world is formed by the form of transcendental synthesis, the form of that synthesis is itself the result of the content of Spirit, a formed Spirit whose content is both form and content. So it is that the abyss of Value is grounded once more in Truth.

Thinking about Hegel makes one think Trinitarian thoughts. The content of the world is the result of the form of the Word: God speaks all things into being. But this divine speaking is never something wholly external to those with eyes to see, because the One speaking is identical to the One testifying to the speaking. There is thus an identity of being and thinking.

Lutheran theology is a Trinitarian theology. Hegel is a Lutheran. And so it happens that Hegelian philosophy is profoundly Trinitarian theology.

So with the insight that Hegel is true, what does one do? One approaches with ontological humility the contour of the world; one explores with epistemological humility the contour of the self knowing the world; and one discerns with religious humility the contour of the divine upon whose absolute ground the subject knows its object.