Disputatio XXXVIII: De Iudicio Teleologico et Fine Naturae

On the Teleological Judgment and the End of Nature

Quaeritur

Utrum iudicium teleologicum, quo mens naturam tamquam ad fines suos ordinatam interpretatur, sit mera reflectio regulativa humanæ rationis, an potius signum objectivum intelligibilis ordinis in ipsa natura, ita ut in eo praenuntiata sit ratio divina, quæ creaturam ad suam perfectionem dirigit.

Whether the teleological judgment, by which the mind interprets nature as ordered toward ends, is merely a regulative reflection of human reason, or rather an objective sign of an intelligible order within nature itself, such that in it is prefigured the divine reason which directs creation toward its perfection.

Thesis

The teleological judgment (teleologisches Urteil) in Kant’s Critique of Judgment expresses reason’s demand to view organized beings and the totality of nature “as if” they were purposively ordered. Though for Kant this demand is regulative, not constitutive, it nonetheless reveals a deep structure of intelligibility in which efficient and final causality converge. Theology may recognize in this reflective unity the vestige of divine wisdom—the Logos—wherein all things receive both their form and their end. The purposiveness discerned by reason is thus the temporal shadow of eternal intentionality.

Locus classicus

Kritik der Urteilskraft, §65 (AA V: 370–371):

“Ein organisirtes Product der Natur ist das, in welchem alles sowohl Zweck als Mittel ist. … Ein solches Product der Natur, wenn es einmal als Naturzweck betrachtet wird, giebt uns zuerst eine Idee von der Natur als einem System nach der Regel der Zwecke.”

“An organized product of nature is one in which everything is at once end and means. … Such a product of nature, once considered as a natural end, gives us for the first time an idea of nature as a system according to the rule of purposes.”

and §67 (AA V: 377):

“Die teleologische Beurtheilung der Natur nach der Analogie mit der Causalität durch Zwecke ist also nur ein Princip der reflectirenden Urtheilskraft, zum Behuf der Vernunft, die Erfahrung nach einem allgemeinen Gesetze zu systematisiren.”

“The teleological judging of nature by analogy with the causality through ends is therefore only a principle of the reflecting power of judgment, for the sake of reason, to systematize experience according to a universal law.”

Explicatio

In the Critique of Judgment, the teleological judgment follows the aesthetic as a higher mode of reflective reasoning. Whereas the judgment of taste feels purposiveness without a concept, the teleological judgment thinks purposiveness in the organization of nature. It is the intellect’s recognition that mechanical explanation alone cannot exhaust the phenomena of life.

Kant argues that certain natural entities, e.g., plants, animals, ecosystems, exhibit a reciprocal structure, for each part exists for the sake of the whole, and the whole sustains the parts. Such entities are Naturzwecke (natural ends). Though he forbids positing real teleology within nature, Kant insists that our reason must judge as if teleology were present, for otherwise the coherence of experience collapses. The teleological judgment thus functions as a transcendental condition of intelligibility, an indispensable heuristic by which nature appears as system rather than chaos.

Philosophically, this means that reason is not satisfied with mechanism. It yearns for meaning, for finality beyond blind efficient causes. The mind’s very structure inclines it to interpret nature as purposive, because the intellect itself, by seeking completion in understanding, is teleological. Kant therefore interprets teleological reflection as the expression of reason’s moral vocation within nature: the world must be seen as suitable to the realization of moral ends.

Theologically, this “as if” points beyond itself, for the necessity of viewing nature as purposive implies an ontological depth in which purposiveness is not mere projection but participation. The ordered interrelation of beings, the mutuality of part and whole, mirrors the rational and creative intentionality of the Logos. The teleologisches Urteil is the creaturely echo of divine wisdom organizing the cosmos ad gloriam Dei. In discerning purposes, reason encounters the world as symbolic of its Creator, the vestigium Providentiae.

The teleological judgment therefore bridges the aesthetic delight in beauty and the moral demand of freedom. It reveals that nature’s form is already ordered toward good, that contingency itself is enfolded in intelligible purpose. The unity Kant leaves indeterminate, theology identifies with the Logos, with the living reason by whom all things are made and toward whom they move.

Objectiones

Ob. I. The critical purist reminds us that Kant himself insists that teleology in nature is merely regulativ and cannot be regarded as constitutiv. To ascribe objective purposiveness is to transgress the limits of possible experience and reintroduce dogmatic metaphysics.

Ob. II. The mechanistic naturalist opines that modern science explains biological organization by physical law, evolution, and chance variation. Teleology is an anthropomorphic metaphor, and thus is not a real feature of nature. The world needs no purpose to be intelligible.

Ob. III. Materialist reductionism supposes that ends are illusions arising from human projection. Since nature’s apparent order is the byproduct of efficient causes and selection, any appeal to purpose is explanatory redundancy.

Ob. IV. Dialectical theology argues that finding divine purposiveness in nature blurs the radical discontinuity between revelation and creation. Providence is not readable from the world but declared in Christ alone. Natural teleology threatens the primacy of grace.

Responsiones

Ad I. Kant’s restriction is methodological, not ontological. To say that teleology is regulative is to confess that reason cannot demonstrate it, not that it is false. The regulative necessity of purposive thinking implies that intelligibility itself is purposive. Theology interprets this necessity not as proof but as participation, for the finite intellect it attuned to divine wisdom.

Ad II. Mechanism describes how, not why. Laws of physics account for regularity but not for the meaningful order those laws presuppose. The intelligibility of evolution itself depends upon an order of possibility that exceeds mere chance. Teleology need not contradict science. Rather it names the deeper rationality that science presupposes.

Ad III. If ends were mere projections, reason would deceive itself at its very core. Yet the human intellect’s drive to seek ends is inherent, not arbitrary. This drive reflects the structure of being itself as intelligible and goal-directed. The presence of purposiveness in thought signifies a correspondence with real finality in creation.

Ad IV. True, revelation consummates what nature intimates. Yet the Logos through whom all things are created is also the Word made flesh. The teleological order of nature is not a rival to grace but its foundation; it is the praeparatio evangelica of the world. Nature’s purposiveness is the created form of divine intentionality that revelation fulfills in Christ.

Nota

The teleological judgment occupies the middle ground between beauty and morality, between the grace of form and the demand of freedom. In the aesthetic, purposiveness is felt; in the teleological, it is conceived; in the moral, it is willed. Kant thereby restores final causality to philosophical dignity, albeit under the sign of reflection.

For theology, this marks the point where philosophy unknowingly touches creation’s inner logic. The world’s intelligibility is not accidental but the signature of divine intention. Every natural end is a finite parable of the ultimate end, a participation in the divine life. The teleological judgment thus prepares the intellect to recognize creation not as mechanism but as ordo amoris, an ordered love reflecting the eternal reason of the Logos.

Determinatio

1. The teleological judgment expresses reason’s necessity to interpret nature as a system of ends.

2. Though regulative for Kant, this necessity implies real participation of created reason in divine reason.

3. In nature’s teleology there appears the trace of Providence, the Logos himself, wherein efficient and final cause coincide.

4. Teleology is the middle path between aesthetic and moral cognition, preparing the intellect to recognize the unity of nature and freedom in the supersensible foundation.

Transitus ad Disputationem XXXIX: De Iudicio Reflectente

If teleological judgment teaches reason to think unity within nature’s manifold purposes, the next step is to inquire into the very power that makes such unification possible. The mind not only discerns purposes but gathers them into an intelligible whole. This reflectierende Urteilskraft—the reflecting power of judgment—mediates between the understanding that legislates laws and the reason that seeks their unity.

Therefore we proceed to Disputationem XXXIX: De Iudicio Reflectente, wherein it shall be asked how the reflecting judgment serves as the image and echo of the divine intellect, gathering the manifold of experience into a unity that anticipates the Logos Himself, in whom all relations of form and finality find their consummation.

Disputatio XXXVII: De Iudicio Aesthetico et Pulchritudine Mundi

On the Aesthetic Judgment and the Beauty of the World

Quaeritur

Utrum iudicium aestheticum, quod Kant describit ut Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck, id est “purposiveness without purpose,” possit intellegi non tantum ut motus subiectivus delectationis, sed etiam ut indicium transcendentalis concordiae inter sensum et intellectum, ita ut in ipso sensibili appareat vestigium formae divinae, quae est principium omnis pulchritudinis creaturae.

Whether the aesthetic judgment, which Kant describes as “purposiveness without purpose,” may be understood not merely as a subjective feeling of pleasure but as an indication of the transcendental harmony between sense and intellect, such that within the sensible there appears a trace of the divine form, the principle of all creaturely beauty.

Thesis

The aesthetic judgment is the experience in which reason is reconciled with sense without the mediation of a concept, revealing an inner accord of faculties otherwise dissonant in ordinary cognition. In this gratuitous harmony, which seeks nothing beyond its own consonance, the intellect touches the trace of divine order. The beauty of the world, though a sensible experience, is an analogy of divine form, a prelude to theology in which the creature manifests the grace of its being.

Locus classicus

Kritik der Urteilskraft, §§1–22 (AA V: 204–231):

“Das Schöne ist das, was ohne Begriff als Gegenstand eines notwendigen Wohlgefallens erkannt wird.”
The beautiful is that which, without a concept, is apprehended as the object of a necessary delight.

and §9 (AA V: 220):

“Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck.”
Purposiveness without purpose.

In these early sections Kant defines the beautiful as that which elicits a feeling of purposive harmony between imagination and understanding, though this harmony cannot be determined conceptually. The judgment of taste thus mediates between the deterministic order of nature and the autonomy of freedom.

Explicatio

Kant’s Critique of Judgment begins with the analysis of aesthetic experience as a phenomenon that unites sensibility and reason without subsuming one to the other. In the judgment of taste, the mind finds itself in a free play. The imagination and understanding correspond spontaneously, producing a feeling of delight that is both individual and universally communicable.

This “purposiveness without purpose” expresses a peculiar transcendental structure. It reveals that the world, as it appears, is not alien to the human faculties of knowledge but proportioned to them as if designed for their accord. The necessity of the aesthetic pleasure, that is that everyone ought to find this beautiful, signals a claim to universal validity that exceeds private emotion.

The aesthetic judgment therefore discloses, though it cannot prove, a transcendental harmony between mind and world. It mediates between the mechanical lawfulness of the first Critique and the moral autonomy of the second, pointing toward a unity that will later demand the supersensible substrate. Beauty thus inaugurates the movement from mere cognition to the awareness of meaning within being.

Theologically interpreted, this experience bears ontological weight. The sensus pulchri is the creature’s pre-conceptual participation in the Logos. In the aesthetic delight that arises from proportion, radiance, and integrity, the human spirit experiences the trace of the divine wisdom through which all things are ordered. The harmony between imagination and understanding mirrors, on a finite plane, the eternal correspondence between divine intellect and created form.

Hence, beauty is not accidental ornamentation but manifestation. It is the appearance of order as grace, the epiphany of being’s intelligibility in sensuous form. The delight of the beautiful is thus the affective echo of divine affirmation: “and behold, it was very good.”

From this point of view, aesthetic judgment is not antithetical to theology but preparatory for it. It establishes the possibility of revelation through form. The same Logos who gives moral law and rational order also shines forth in the splendor of form. What Kant calls the free harmony of the faculties may therefore be seen as the creaturely reflection of that intra-divine harmony through which form, end, and delight coincide in God.

Objectiones

Ob. I. Empiricism argues that beauty is a sensory affection, and that the universality of aesthetic judgment is a fiction of communication, not a property of the object. No knowledge lies in delight.

Ob. II. Critical formalism claims that Kant himself denies that the aesthetic judgment can teach anything about God or the ends of nature. It is only a mode of reflection on our faculties, not a revelation of transcendental things.

Ob. III. The theology of the cross teaches that God is revealed in deformity and suffering, not in beauty. Beauty is the glory of the creature, but God hides beneath its opposite.

Ob. IV. Existentialism avers that beauty reveals nothing; it is an affective compensation for the absurdity of existence, not a vision of divine order.

Responsiones

Ad I. The feeling of beauty involves a claim to universal assent, and this claim transcends the private. Such universality without concept implies an objective ground of harmony between the faculties and the world. Even if empirical verification is impossible, the structure of the judgment presupposes a common rational order, an analogical participation in intelligible form.

Ad II. While Kant forbids metaphysical inference, he admits transcendental signification. The aesthetic judgment intimates the purposiveness of nature without defining its cause. Theology, interpreting this sign as vestigium sapientiae divinae, does not overstep critique but fulfills its openness. The “as if” of purposiveness becomes the “because” of creation.

Ad III. The cross does not abolish form but reveals its transfiguration. In Christ crucified, beauty and horror coincide; the pulchritudo crucis is beauty reconciled to truth. Thus, the theology of the cross deepens aesthetics: it discloses that true form is not symmetry alone but the radiance of love that gives itself.

Ad IV. Existential alienation misreads delight as flight. Yet the very capacity to perceive beauty amid suffering testifies to a transcendent order sustaining existence. Aesthetic joy is not escape but participation; it is the creature’s resonance with the intelligible goodness that grounds being against nothingness.

Nota

The aesthetic judgment marks the first recovery, after modernity’s fragmentation, of a holistic vision of reason and sense. Where the first Critique disjoined knowing from being, feeling here restores their secret unity. Beauty becomes the threshold by which epistemology turns toward ontology.

For theology, this signifies that revelation does not first occur in propositions but in splendor, in the radiance of form that draws the mind toward its source. In the delight of the beautiful, the soul anticipates participation: forma becomes praeambulum gratiae.

Determinatio

1. Aesthetic judgment is a harmony of the transcendental faculties; it is a sign of the concordance between reason and the world. 

2. Beauty, in so far as it is sensible, is an analogy of the divine form in which the intellect and sense are joined together. 

3. Delight in beauty is a pre-conceptual participation in the Logos, who is both form and finality of creation.

4. Aesthetics therefore prepares for teleology; feeling gives way to reflection, and purposiveness felt becomes purposiveness thought.

Transitus ad Disputationem XXXVIII: De Iudicio Teleologico et Fine Naturae

If in beauty the soul feels purposiveness without purpose, in teleology the intellect thinks purposiveness with an end implied. Aesthetic harmony awakens a sense of design; teleological reflection interprets that design as order.

Therefore, we advance to Disputatio XXXVIII: De Iudicio Teleologico et Fine Naturae, wherein it will be asked how the reflective reason, moving from the experience of beauty, comes to posit purposiveness as a principle of nature itself, and how this transition anticipates the theological doctrine of creation ordered toward the glory of God.

Disputatio XL: De Substrato Supersensibili et Fundamentis Finalitatis

On the Supersensible Substrate and the Foundations of Finality

Quaeritur

Utrum notio Kantiana de substrato supersensibili, quod naturae et libertatis communis est, possit intellegi non solum transcendentaliter sed etiam ontologice, ita ut idem substratum theologice referatur ad Logos, in quo omnis finalitas creaturarum fundatur.

Whether Kant’s notion of a supersensible substrate, common to nature and freedom, may be understood not merely transcendently but ontologically, as the Logos in whom all creaturely purposiveness is grounded.

Thesis

The übersinnliches Substrat in Kant’s Critique of Judgment functions as the unifying ground that reconciles the realms of nature and freedom. While for Kant it remains an indeterminate concept, accessible only as a limiting idea, theology may recognize in it the ontological trace of the Logos—the living unity in which intelligibility, causality, and purposiveness converge. It is thus the hidden depth of divine reason through which all finality in creation derives its coherence.

Locus Classicus

Kritik der Urteilskraft, §57 (AA V:195–196):

“Es muß also ein gemeinschaftliches, aber uns unbekanntes, Substrat, dem sowohl der Natur, als dem Freiheitsgesetze gemäß, zum Grunde liegen, mithin die Möglichkeit der Einheit des Übersinnlichen, welches unter beiden liegt, sein.”

“There must therefore lie at the basis of both nature and the law of freedom a common, though to us unknown, substrate; hence there must be the possibility of a unity of the supersensible that underlies both.”

and §59 (AA V:198):

“Die Vernunft kann sich diese Übereinstimmung des Zweckmäßigen in der Natur mit demjenigen in der Freiheit gar nicht anders denken, als daß beide einer gemeinschaftlichen, aber uns unbekannten obersten Ursache, dem Übersinnlichen, angehören.”

“Reason can think this accord of what is purposive in nature with that in freedom in no other way than that both belong to a common, though to us unknown, highest cause—the supersensible.”

In these passages, Kant articulates the transcendental postulate that there must exist a common supersensible foundation underlying the two heterogeneous orders of experience, nature (necessity) and freedom (morality), even though reason cannot determine its nature conceptually.

Explicatio

The Critique of Judgment culminates in the discovery of a hidden unity that underlies the dualisms of Kant’s earlier critiques. Nature, governed by mechanical causality, and freedom, ruled by moral law, require a common ground if human reason is to see the world as one intelligible system. This ground is not empirical but supersensible; it is that which cannot appear within phenomena yet makes the unity of appearances and moral law possible.

For Kant, this übersinnliches Substrat is a necessary postulate of reason: it is the “unknown ground” (unbekanntes Substrat) in which the natural and moral orders share participation. It guarantees the possibility that the world of sense can be adequate to the purposes of reason, that creation as we know it can serve as a theater for the realization of moral ends.

Philosophically, this substrate is the transcendental condition of finality, the point of coincidence between efficient and final causality. It explains why the reflective judgment may legitimately interpret nature as if ordered toward ends. For, after all, such order is not accidental but rooted in a unity beyond the distinction of mechanism and teleology.

Theologically, this unity discloses the deep structure of participation. The supersensible substrate is the point at which creation remains held in being by the eternal Word. The Logos functions as the ens commune intelligibile, the "common intelligible being," the ontological depth in which form, purpose, and act coincide. What Kant calls “supersensible” is precisely what theology calls divine wisdom as immanent cause. It is the living intelligibility through which the world is not merely caused but constituted.

In the first Critique, reason was divided against itself; in the second, it sought its own autonomy. In the third, however, it begins to glimpse its unity in a common foundation. Kant’s “unknown cause” becomes, for theology, the known mystery, the Logos as the ground of both natural order and moral law.

Thus, the übersinnliches Substrat is not a sterile limit but a sign of participation. It is the horizon where finite being opens upon its divine origin. Just as the reflectierende Urteilskraft gathers the manifold into unity, so the supersensible substrate grounds that unity ontologically. It is the “gathering depth” of the Logos, the point at which all created teleology returns to its source and finds its coherence.

Objectiones

Ob. I. For the early Kant, the supersensible substrate is a Grenzbegriff, a boundary concept, introduced only to regulate thought. It carries no positive ontological content. To identify it with the Logos transgresses the limits of reason and collapses critique into dogmatism.

Ob. II. Naturalistic mechanism holds that teleology is a heuristic projection, and thus there is no need for a supersensible substrate. The unity of nature is explicable by physical law and probabilistic regularity, not by appeal to metaphysical grounds.

Ob. III. Atheistic existentialism supposes that Kant’s supersensible substrate is an empty abstraction masking human alienation. It does not unite nature and freedom but hides their disjunction under an illusion of harmony. To theologize it is to sanctify alienation.

Ob. IV. Dialectical theology declares that any “common ground” of nature and freedom undermines the radical distinction between Creator and creature. Revelation admits no shared substrate; God’s transcendence excludes ontological mediation.

Responsiones

Ad I. The limitation of reason to regulative use does not annul the ontological implication of its postulates. Kant’s Grenzbegriff marks the boundary not of being but of conceptual knowledge. The postulation of a unity beyond phenomena already implies its real possibility. Theology interprets this not as speculative knowledge but as metaphysical participation. It is the intellect’s recognition that its own act of synthesis is grounded in divine unity.

Ad II. Mechanism describes order but cannot account for its necessity. Physical law presupposes the very rationality it explains. The coherence of empirical causality and moral teleology cannot itself be causal; it requires a ground transcending both. The supersensible substrate expresses the logical necessity of an intelligible order that precedes empirical description.

Ad III. The accusation of abstraction misunderstands Kant’s intention. The supersensible substrate does not mask alienation but names the condition of possibility for overcoming it. It points to a unity that cannot yet be possessed but that nonetheless draws the finite toward reconciliation—a yearning that theology names participatio in Verbo.

Ad IV. The Creator–creature distinction remains intact. The supersensible substrate does not dissolve transcendence but affirms it as the ground of immanence. To say that nature and freedom share a common ground is not to identify them with God, but to confess that both proceed from and depend upon the divine act of creation, in which the Logos sustains their relation.

Nota

Kant’s übersinnliches Substrat is a pivotal moment in the history of reason: the first modern attempt to speak, within critical limits, of an ontological unity beyond empirical and moral dualism. In it, reason confesses— albeit unwittingly—its dependence upon what theology calls divine wisdom. The substratum gathers the scattered orders of necessity and freedom into a single purposive horizon. Accordingly, it is the silent counterpart to the Word through whom all things are made.

Theologically interpreted, this substrate is not a “thing” beyond experience but the presence of intelligibility itself—the immanent trace of God’s creative Logos within the fabric of reality. Where reason perceives an unknowable cause, faith perceives the infinite intelligibility of God acting within and through creation.

Determinatio

1. The übersinnliches Substrat signifies the transcendental unity grounding both the natural and moral orders;. tt is the necessary presupposition of any teleological relation between them.

2. Though Kant presents it as unknowable, its very necessity implies an ontological reality, a divine act of unity prior to all distinction.

3. This ground is best interpreted theologically as the Logos, the living rationality through which all being receives its order and purpose.

4. The supersensible substrate thus expresses in critical terms what theology confesses in creedal form, that all things subsist and cohere in ipso.

5. The human experience of purposiveness is therefore a finite reflection of the eternal finality of the Word, in whom creation and freedom converge.

Transitus ad Disputationem XLI: De Phenomenologia et Apparitione Entis

The supersensible substrate, in which Kant discerned the hidden unity of nature and freedom, marks the highest reach of transcendental reflection. Here, reason approaches its own boundary wherein the unconditioned ground of appearance must be thought, yet cannot itself appear. But what for critical philosophy remains a limit, for theology becomes a threshold: limen revelationis.

For the supersensible is not the negation of the sensible, but its depth. The Logos who grounds all purposiveness does not remain forever concealed behind phenomena. Rather, He gives Himself in appearance, not as an object among others, but as the manifesting of manifestation itself. What the übersinnliches Substrat named in abstraction, phenomenology will seek in concretion: the event of being as appearing.

Thus we pass from the critical postulate of unity to the phenomenological experience of presence. The next disputation therefore asks how being itself comes to light, and how this Erscheinung des Seins may be understood as the self-showing of divine intelligibility.

We proceed, then, to Disputationem XLI: De Phenomenologia et Apparitione Entis, in which it will be examined whether the appearing of being discloses not merely the conditions of experience but the act of the Logos through whom all things are made manifest.

Disputatio XXXIX: De Iudicio Reflectente et Mediis Transcendentalibus

On Reflecting Judgment and the Transcendental Media

Quaeritur

Utrum iudicium reflectens, quod inter intellectum et rationem mediare intendit, in ipsa ratione humana exprimat imaginem intellectus divini, ita ut ratio finita per participationem eiusdem logici ordinis possit adunare naturam et libertatem in unitate transcendentalis finalitatis.

Whether the reflecting judgment, which mediates between understanding and reason, expresses within human reason an image of the divine intellect, such that the finite mind, by participation in that same logical order, may unite nature and freedom within a transcendental unity of finality.

Thesis

The reflecting judgment is the finite echo of divine intelligence. Whereas the determining judgment merely applies universals already possessed, the reflecting judgment searches for the universal latent within the given particular. In this creative search the human intellect mirrors the divine act by which the Logos draws form out of multiplicity and unites it within a purposive whole. It is therefore the participatory point at which human reason, open to both nature and freedom, attests its origin in the transcendent order of divine reason.

Locus Classicus

Kritik der Urteilskraft, §77 (AA V:406):

“Die Urteilskraft hat also ein Prinzip a priori für die Möglichkeit der Natur, als eines Systems der Gesetze; aber nur in ihrer reflektirenden, nicht in ihrer bestimmenden Gebrauch.”

“The power of judgment therefore has an a priori principle for the possibility of nature as a system of laws—but only in its reflecting, not in its determining use.”

and §57 (AA V:179):

“Die Urteilskraft überhaupt ist das Vermögen, das Besondere als unter dem Allgemeinen enthalten zu denken. Ist das Allgemeine (die Regel, das Prinzip, das Gesetz) gegeben, so ist das Urteil, welches das Besondere darunter subsumirt, bestimmend. Ist aber nur das Besondere gegeben, wozu sie das Allgemeine finden soll, so ist das Urteil reflectirend.”

“The power of judgment in general is the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given, then the judgment which subsumes the particular under it is determining. But if only the particular is given, for which it is to find the universal, then the judgment is reflecting.”

These passages locate the Urteilskraft reflectirend as that faculty through which human reason, lacking the divine intellect’s immediate unity of concept and intuition, nonetheless participates analogically in the Logos by seeking the universality immanent within the given.

Explicatio

Kant distinguishes between two uses of judgment:

1. Determining judgment (bestimmende Urteilskraft) applies a known universal to a particular. It functions executively, reproducing a conceptual order already supplied by the understanding.

2. Reflecting judgment (reflectierende Urteilskraft) begins with the particular and seeks the universal appropriate to it. It functions creatively, establishing unity where none is given.

This difference corresponds to two modes of intellect. The determining judgment imitates the providential intellectus ordinans, the intellect that administers law already decreed. The reflecting judgment, by contrast, imitates the intellectus creator, the divine mind that gives form to what has no prior rule.

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant introduces this reflective power to mediate between nature and freedom, the realms sundered by his earlier critiques. The reflecting judgment discovers a Zweckmäßigkeit der Natur, a purposiveness of nature that, though not demonstrable as an objective property, is nonetheless necessarily presupposed by human reason. This purposiveness is not a law among others but the very possibility of lawfulness as such.

The mind, in reflecting upon nature, finds itself compelled to think the world als ob it were ordered for cognition and moral vocation. In this “as if,” finite intellect testifies to its participation in an order beyond itself. The reflecting judgment, therefore, is not a mere psychological projection but the echo of divine ordering, the resonance of the Logos within the act of human intellection.

Whereas the bestimmende Urteilskraft operates within a finished creation, the reflectierende Urteilskraft experiences the world as if it were still being formed. It is the cognitive analogue of divine creativity: the search for unity that mirrors the eternal act in which the divine intellect knows both universal and particular as one.

Here the theology of the Logos as gathering becomes luminous. The Logos unites the dispersed into intelligible wholeness; it is the principle in which multiplicity coheres. Likewise, the reflecting judgment performs, within the finite mind, this same gathering act by drawing together the scattered manifold of experience, and seeking the universal that would make them one. In this unifying motion the intellect imitates the divine Logos, whose gathering of creation into order is mirrored analogically in every act of reflective understanding.

Thus, the reflecting judgment may be called participatory: its movement from the particular to the universal is an analogical repetition, in finitude, of God’s movement from universal wisdom to particular creature. Through it, the human intellect becomes aware that all understanding presupposes being already gathered into intelligibility by the Word.

The transcendental media through which this participation is perceived are two:

• Aesthetic judgment, wherein beauty intimates purposive unity without concept;

• Teleological judgment, wherein the order of nature is discerned as if it were designed.

Both express, under finite conditions, the infinite intelligibility of creation.

Objectiones

Ob. I. Kant's earlier critical idealism claimed that the purposiveness of nature is only regulativ, not konstitutiv. It guides reflection but asserts nothing about things themselves. To identify this structure with divine intellect reintroduces dogmatic metaphysics which the Critique sought to overcome.

Ob. II. Empirical naturalism hold that the sense of purposiveness is an anthropomorphic projection. Human cognition evolved to impose order for survival; teleology is a byproduct of adaptation, not a window into divine reason.

Ob. III. Dialectical theology asserts that there can be no analogia entis between Creator and creature. The reflectierende Urteilskraft is a natural faculty, bound by sin, incapable of genuine participation in divine knowing. Revelation alone bridges the gap.

Ob. IV.  Heidegger supposes that the Urteilskraft remains imprisoned within subject-object metaphysics. What it calls purposiveness is merely the forgotten openness of Being (Seinsvergessenheit). Participation must be replaced by Ereignis, the event in which Being itself discloses.

Responsiones

Ad 1. The regulative status of purposiveness does not preclude its metaphysical significance. What Kant calls “regulative” may, from the theological side, be seen as the phenomenal trace of divine constitutivity. The intellect’s necessity to think unity reveals that reality is not chaos but already grounded in the rational order of the Logos. The “als ob” points beyond itself: it is the finite mirror of a unity that truly is.

Ad 2. Empirical projection theory presupposes the very congruence of mind and world it seeks to explain. If teleology were merely adaptive, its success in tracking real structures of order would be inexplicable. The evolutionary account explains why we look for unity, not why unity is there to be found. Purposiveness in cognition presupposes purposiveness in being.

Ad 3. The analogia entis asserted here is ontological, not salvific. It concerns the structure of reason as created participation in divine wisdom, not redemptive grace. To deny all analogy makes revelation unintelligible, for the Word can address humanity only because humanity shares, however finitely, in the Logos’ capacity for meaning.

Ad 4. Heidegger’s Ereignis can be read as a radicalized form of the same insight: manifestation itself presupposes participation in the source of manifestation. The reflecting judgment is the finite act through which Being’s intelligibility becomes known. It is the cognitive correlate to what phenomenology calls Erscheinen, the shining-forth of being.

Nota

The reflectierende Urteilskraft is Kant’s most theologically potent discovery. In it, reason ceases to dominate and begins to listen; it seeks to discern the universal latent within the given particular.

The bestimmende Urteilskraft resembles divine providence as administration of established law; the reflectierende Urteilskraft resembles divine wisdom as creation in act. Its searching movement from particular to universal is the finite image of that divine understanding in which all multiplicity is comprehended at once.

Through this faculty, human reason discloses its participatory vocation: to seek, to gather, and to unify in correspondence with the eternal act of the Logos. Thus, the Critique of Judgment quietly reinstates metaphysics at the heart of critique—an ontology of participation veiled beneath epistemological modesty.

Determinatio

1. The reflectierende Urteilskraft differs from the bestimmende not only functionally but ontologically: it imitates, under finite conditions, the creative act of divine intelligence.

2. The “regulative” purposiveness Kant describes is the phenomenal sign of a deeper, constitutive order grounded in the Logos.

3. The finite mind’s search for unity mirrors the divine intellect’s perfect intuition of unity; the difference is not of kind but of mode. It is participation not possession.

4. The reflectierende Urteilskraft thus mediates nature and freedom by attesting that both share a common root in supersensible reason.

5. Human judgment, in its reflecting capacity, bears witness that intellect itself is a participation in the divine actus essendi intelligibilis, the act by which the Word comprehends all things as ordered.

Transitus ad Disputationem XL: De Substrato Supersensibili et Fundamentis Finalitatis

If the reflectierende Urteilskraft reveals the mind’s participatory openness to divine unity, then the next question concerns the ground of this unity itself. What is the hidden bond that makes both nature and freedom intelligible within one order of purposiveness?

Therefore we proceed to Disputationem XL: De Substrato Supersensibili et Fundamentis Finalitatis, wherein it shall be examined whether Kant’s das übersinnliche Substrat—the supersensible substrate underlying both natural and moral purposiveness—may be interpreted as the ontological depth of the Logos: the living foundation of all teleology and the inner intelligibility of creation itself.

Worlds and Difference: Theology in an Ecstatic Age?

I. When the World Was What it Was

Once upon a time in the west we believed that there was a world that existed apart from us.  There were many versions of how this was so, but the paradigm was clear: Entities and the properties that they instance are what they are apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.  

Aristotle (384-322 BCE) spoke of primary substances as the basic building blocks of the world. These substances have properties that are either present in them or can be said of them.  Those properties that are present in the primary substances are called accidents.  They inhere in primary substances, and constitute the way that the substances can be modified.  Accidents are always parasitic on substances; they cannot obtain other than being in a primary substance.  Aristotle identified nine accidents that primary substances could have: quantity, quality, relation, habit (state), time, location, position, action and passion.  

Primary substances and their nine accidents constitute the ten categories Aristotle discusses in his book, The Categories.  The important point is that the accidents do not individuate one substance from another.  Rather, individuation of substances happens at an ontological level prior to accidents.  Substances come already individuated, and these already individuated substances sustain accidents that that modify it; they constitute at any time how the substance is being the substance that it is. 

For Aristotle, however, substances are more than their mere accidental properties.  Certain things can be said of these primary substances, and that which can be said of primary substances are not accidental to these substances.  For instance, 'man' can be said of Socrates, and the predication of 'man' to 'Socrates' is not an accident of Socrates, because while Socrates could presumably be Socrates and not have his snub nose, Socrates cannot be Socrates without being a man.  In The Categories, Aristotle asserts that the secondary substance man is said of the primary substance Socrates.  This said of relation concerns what is essential to Socrates, that without which Socrates could not be Socrates.  

Secondary substances in Aristotle are clearly a reworking of Plato's notion of the forms.  For Plato, the form man is instantiated at the location of Socrates and is accordingly that which is known when one knows Socrates as a man.  Plato famously gives ontological priority to the forms (universals) over the concrete particulars that instantiate them. Aristotle's secondary substances, however, do not have the ontological priority Plato had given to the forms. For Aristotle, concrete primary substances are more real than the abstract secondary substances that can be said of them.  Accordingly, the world for Aristotle is comprised of concrete primary substances having essential properties by virtue of the said of relation and accidental properties by virtue of the present in relation. 

This basic way of seeing the world in terms of substances and properties was firmly in place by the thirteenth century with its so-called "rediscovery of Aristotle", and it survived throughout the Reformation and the trajectories of theological development arising immediately from it. The idea of substances possessing properties formed the basic metaphysical background on which both the physical world and the world of the divine rested.  While it was always problematic in the theological tradition simply to think of God as a substance having properties, the idea that God is some thing existing on its own apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language seemed clear enough.  While it might stretch language to call God a 'substance', God nevertheless does, like any substance, exist on its own and is individuated in itself. Accordingly, the world comes ready-made, both with respect to primary physical substances and the most important entity of all: God. Things are what they are apart from human beings.  The ontological order is thus independent from the human epistemological activity of knowing it.  

Aristotle and the tradition prior to the Enlightenment was thus realist with respect to its understanding of substances and the properties they might have.  This realism extended to the notion of causality as well.  Aristotle famously gave a four-fold analysis of causality, citing a material, formal, efficient and final cause for why a substance can give up some of its properties while assuming new ones.  The idea is that any substance is what it is by virtue of it being "formed matter," or "actualized potentiality."  Any object that is, is what it is by virtue of its individuating form which makes it a particular substance.  Aristotle's hylomorphism claims that all substances are constituted by particular actualizations of that which could have been actualized in a different ways.  A substance's nature constitutes the whatness by virtue of which an object is that which it is.  

Change happens in two basic ways. If one substance is to cease and another substance begin, there must be a change in that substance's form.  If a substance is to be modified some of its accidental properties must cease and others must rise.  In both instances, the substances already posses the possibility of these transformations.  What is needed is an efficient cause to collapse the possibility of this transformation into a determinate actualization.  The substance water is potentially ice, but this potentiality is actualized when. temperatures reach a particular level.  

Aristotle, however, saw the universe teleologically, and thus added a fourth cause to the material, formal and efficient causes.  Trajectories of transformation must ultimately be explained in terms of purpose or final cause. The final cause of the acorn is an oak tree, and this cause operates in selecting among efficient causes to actualize substances in particular ways over time. The point of all of this is that Aristotle saw causality as built into the nature of things.  For him, both substances and the causal connections in which they are ingredient have a determinate trajectory apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.  

While the language of substances, properties and causality seemed suited for conceiving the natural world, medieval thinkers knew that problems arose in using the Aristotelian categories to understand the divine.  God clearly exists apart from us, but His having of properties is not like our having of properties, and any changes that might be attributed to Him cannot be the result of external efficient causality.  

Of course, the tradition held that the perfection of God entailed his immutability.  Were God to change, God would need to move from one state to another. But if God is perfect, God cannot move from one state to another because either God would have to move from a state of lesser perfection to a state of perfection -- and thus not be perfect -- or move from a state of perfection to a state of lesser perfection -- and thus not be perfect. 

 Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) following much of the tradition famously argued for the divine simplicity of God by claiming property-talk of God does not pick out in God some properties that God may or may not have, but such talk merely is a way of characterizing, picking out, or referring to the divinely simple substance that is God.  Accordingly, 'God is good' cannot mean that the substance God has the property of goodness, but is a picking out of some being without parts, a being of which one might attribute goodness merely analogically.  Whatever God is in se, God is more like a being to which we might customarily attribute goodness than to a being to which we might customarily attribute evil.  

When it came to Christology in the age of when the world was what it was, Christ had to be understood to be some kind of substance or person who had its own principle of individuality and who is what He is apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.  Such a person has natures or batches of properties, some of which are essential and some accidental for Christ being the person He is.  The Trinity and incarnation must be understood realistically.  Just as the world is what it is apart from us, so is Christ and his Trinitarian and incarnational relationships what they are apart from us.  Human salvation too must be understood realistically.  The believer is a person who is who she is, and Christ who is who He is apart from her (and us) effects a transformation of the believer (either intrinsically or extrinsically) such that the properties that the person has are themselves changed.  All of this could be talked about through Aristotelian notions of causality.  On the basis of a final cause, there is an efficient cause that collapses potentiality into actuality; indeterminate matter is formed.  Accordingly, the real ontic unity of theosis must be understood metaphysically.  There are properties of believer and properties of Christ such that parts of the believer change and the believer is not that which the believer once was.  

Since what I am attempting here is merely a sketch of that time when the world was what it was, I will not develop further here a fully metaphysical Christology except to say that Christology had to be understood metaphysically at this time.  This is not to say that this metaphysical understanding was all that there was to Christology.  The relation of sin, justification, faith, and regeneration is complex, and, as Luther taught us, metaphysical categories strain to express the reality of God and his relationship to us.  

II. When the World was What it was For Us 

Kant (1724-1804) famously argued that we have no immediate experience to thing-in-themselves, but only things in so far as they already are for us.  Kant argued that the realm of the thing-in-itself was supersensible because no human senses could put us into touch with this realm.  Knowledge of the world we experience proceeds, for Kant, through our encounter with objects already constituted by us. Conception without perception if void and perception without conception is blind.  

Kant's solution to the problem that had beset Descartes (1596-1650) and had become acute in the British empiricists -- the problem of the external world -- was that while we do not have immediate access to the external world apart from us, we do encounter the external world as already organized by us.  This means inter alia the the "externality of the world," the contour of the world as it is presumably apart from us is already a product of us.  We have mediated access to the external world. Accordingly, when we know the external world, we know our representation (organization) of it. While the realm of experience may be a "joint product" of mind and external world, we only have access to that which is already organized by the mind.  Accordingly, knowing the other -- the otherness of the world -- is to know ourselves profoundly, for we are the ones organizing the world of experience.   

Kant inaugurated the tradition of transcendental reflection: What are the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience itself? Kant argued plausibly that the contingency of the world is grounded both in the necessary structures by which we organize percepts in space and time and those necessary concepts that function as rules by which the manifold of perception is united. 

After Kant the world was not the same. The world does not come as it is in itself, a world so metaphysically regular that we can find general categories by which to comprehend it, rather the world comes bearing the marks of the determining judgments of the human understanding by which objects take on the general features they do.  Famously, the world is not in itself an arena in which self-determining substances are what they are while being causally connected one to the other.  Rather the world reflects the very order we put upon it.  Just as we are autonomous with respect to morality, so are we with respect to the external world. We are the law-makers of each realm!  Since we are law-makers of the moral and worldly, we gain insight into ourselves when we know the world.  Knowing the other happens only in and through knowing ourselves, our capacities and proclivities of organization.  While the world apart from us -- the supersensible realm -- remains hidden in itself, we know something about it by examining the capacities we have to reflect it. 

Kant, and not Fichte, was in many ways the author of German idealism.  Kant knew that the world was reflected in our activity of reflecting upon our own reflecting.  The transcendental world is not like the old world-in-itself.  In the transcendental world, we find not things in the world, but rather things as they show themselves in their aboutness of the world in us.  While the older Aristotelian way of thinking posits primary substances existing on their own, Kant's objects are those by concepts of which the manifold of experience is united.  Transcendental questions don't deal with the world, but the conditions by which the world is the world.  To explore the transcendental horizon is to dig deeper than the world in order to find those structures which make the world possible.  The world as world is made possible by that transcendental unity of apperception by and through which the world in its particularity is birthed.  

The story after Kant is so well known that it scarcely needs repeating.  Fichte denied the cut between the world in itself and the world for us, and thus ridded philosophy of that which cannot be accessed and is not needed to explain the particularity of the world.  Accordingly, when it comes to the world, the spade does not need to stop somewhere in some dull non-conscious things existing somewhere outside us waiting to be known.  For Fichte, all that is necessary is that one thinks, and in one's thinking the world in its particularity is born.  

Fichte's take on Kant motivated subsequent thinkers like Shelling and Hegel to reflect upon their acts of reflection,  an act they called "speculation" from the Latin word for mirror, speculum.  To reflect on reflecting is no longer to access things, but to reflect on those conditions by and through which things are organized before us.   

Kant, Fichte, Shelling and Hegel together constitute a trajectory of thinking that denies the immediacy of the world.  The world is not what it is apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, and there can be no immediate apprehension of it.  Instead our apprehension of the world is mediated by the particularity of our perceptual and conceptual organizing activity.  But while all of these thinkers knew that knowing the world is mediated by the particularity of that by which the world is known -- the human epistemic apparatus --- they nonetheless followed Descartes in assuming that they can directly know themselves.  We have access to our own ideas, after all!  While our ideas or "representations" constitute a screen through which the world is known, there is no screen at all between us and our ideas.   

Descartes had argued that while I can conceive of a scenario in which my seeming knowledge of the world is not genuine knowledge, I cannot conceive of a scenario in which my seeming knowledge of myself is not genuine knowledge. Since the condition of doubt is that there exists one who doubts, the condition for doubting the immediacy of the world is the immediacy of the self doubting.  While critical thought can dislodge the immediacy of the world in its doubting the world, it cannot dislodge the immediacy of the self as the transcendental condition for the possibility of doubting the world. 

Accordingly, while Kant is wary of trusting that the world really is in se what it appears to be pro nobis, he seemingly gives transcendental reflection a complete pass.  There is a transcendental unity of apperception that makes possible the unity of our experience, and while we can legitimately question whether the unity of our experience rests upon how the world might be apart from us, we cannot question what the transcendental unity of apperception might be apart from our apprehension of it.  Clearly, the game has changed. There is no longer a world that is what it is apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.  Human beings give natural laws to the order of nature.  However, the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience as such are what they are apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.  In transcendental reflection we reach an arena of objectivity. While the world is mediately known, we have an immediate apprehension in transcendental reflection of that by which the world is mediately known. 

By the time of Hegel (1770-1831), however, problems with this picture are emerging.  Hegel knew that the categories by which the world is known are not simply objectively present and ready for the fateful gaze of transcendental reflection. They are not simply "shot from the pistol," but are themselves dynamic and in play historically.  Hegel recognized that the subject's grasp of its own self through its categories were at issue if one could not explain how the dynamism of the categories is itself objective.  Accordingly, Hegel's move to absolute knowledge is a move by which the immediacy of the categories could be restored.  

If knowledge is at all to be possible, there must be a perspective that gets to the thing itself.  If this is not the world, then it must be those transcendental conditions by which the world becomes world.  Since the immediacy of those transcendental conditions cannot be vouchsafed any longer by the subject, these conditions must be guaranteed by the Absolute that "takes up" all conditioned finite perspectives, whose taking up itself is necessary for the writing of books about the "taking up."  The Absolute Idea unfolds through concepts allowing the grasping of transcendental content, a historically mediated grasping that grants an immediacy to that which would otherwise remain wholly mediated. 

Notice that as the world became what it is for us, the world of as it is for us was true both of the manifest image of the world as well as its scientific image (Sellars). The manifest image of the world is clearly not the world as it is in itself. The scientific image which tries to explain those mechanisms by virtue of which the world is manifest, however, is often assumed to be what ultimately is the case.  However, it is clear that if there is no immediate access to the world in itself as the manifest world, there can be no such access to the world in itself as the scientific world of mechanisms by virtue of which the world is manifest.  The scientific world with all of its objective structures is a world that cannot be more immediate than the manifest world.  Accordingly, it is a world for us.  The manifest image of the world and the scientific image of it do not deal with the world as it is apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language. Simply put, the world bears the marks of that for whom it is a world.  

Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel had theological aspirations, of course.  While much has been written about the the changed metaphysical climate after Kant, not as much has been written about the relevance of this changed climate for theology.  If we cannot know the supersensible world -- if the very notion of the supersensuous drives us beyond the bounds of all possible experience -- we cannot also know any regions of that supersensuous realm, e.g., theology.  Kant, of course, recognized this and claimed that he "had done away with knowledge of God to make room for faith." 

Kant had argued that the categories of substance and causality cannot apply to objects outside the realm of the phenomena.  This means, inter alia, that one cannot apply 'substance' or 'causality' to God.  God cannot be a substance bearing causal relations to other substances because there are no precepts being united to organize experience into one in which there are gods.  Gods do not exist in the phenomenal, and there are no metaphysical arguments showing conclusively that God must exist.  One might believe in the realm of the supersensible, but one cannot ever know those supersensible substances putatively causally connected to other supersensible entities or entities in the world.  

While knowing the external world occurs when we know the ways we have organized that external world -- when we know ourselves properly! -- knowing the supersensible world is not possible even though we are again thinking about our thinking.  Thinking about our thinking with regard to the phenomenal gives discrete knowable experience.  Thinking about our thinking with regard to the noumenal does not issue in any knowable experience, but rather can only put us in touch with our way of thinking.  Theology does not give experience, but it does constitute a way of thinking.  

So how must Christology proceed on the other side of Kant?  Given that we have no epistemic right to claim that we know the divine/human constitution -- nor the causality through which the divine person in Jesus of Nazereth effects salavation -- what do we do when doing theology and thinking our philosophy rightly?  What ought be the ways forward in Christology on the other side of Kant? What does theology become when its world is a world that is only for us?  

Since concepts are rules of possible syntheses, relating concepts in Christology must be a relating of ways in which such syntheses might relate to each other.  What can "two natures in one person" mean in the non-metaphysics of post-Kantian reflection?  After all, to speak of divine and human nature is to speak of that which lies beyond human experience.  Add the notion of 'person' to the mix and we are talking about the ordering of our ideas and not about the synthesis of experience.  Our ideas do not constitute experience, but they are important in how we must think aspects of our experience.  

Kant famously saw Christology as flowing from morality, and understood that human beings are unavoidably in the middle of moral life, even though moral life is not one of experience. There will be much more exploration of this in later posts, but for now we must continue our story beyond when the world was what is was for us to when the world turned ceased to be for us at all.  We must examine what happens when the world becomes worldless.  

III. Beyond the World as it was For Us

When the world was what it was, the world was in itself what it was.  The trajectory of thinking inaugurated by Kant gave a world no longer in itself, but a world now merely for us.  When the world was in itself, the world was known in its immediacy.  When the world became what it is for us, the world was known in its mediacy.  Both the in itself and the for itself of the world nonetheless presupposes that there was an immediacy to that by which the world is known in itself and for itself.  

Transcendental reflection that had dislodged the immediacy of the world nonetheless presupposed its immediate graspability. While Hegel increasingly realized that no Archimedean standpoint for transcendental reflection existed, his creative attempt to understand the various limited standpoints of transcendental reflection as manifestations of an unconditioned Absolute transcendental perspective that yet united the limited, conditioned, historically-mediated acts of transcendental reflection, kept at bay for a time the dawning realization that our acts of reflection are mediated as well, that is to say, there is no immediate access to ourselves.  Our putative privileged access to the contents of our own mind is a chimera.  While Descartes was often deluded about his access to the external world, we thinkers after Kant have been deluded about our access to our own thinking.  

The age that dawned after the age of the world as it is for us, is an age that increasingly took seriously that by virtue of which we thought we knew ourselves: it took seriously the language by and through which we thought we had found ourselves. This attention to language occurred both in the Anglo-American and the Continental expressions of philosophy, though in different ways.  The story here is complex and filled with surprising turns in trajectory.  Simply put, the twentieth century was an age that increasingly came to recognize that our capacities of self-representation are dependent upon others in surprising ways: our concepts, language and values are not our possessions by which we can objectively explore both the world and our own exploration of the world, but are themselves historically-conditioned social products.  

The words we use we did not create, and the concepts by which we think, we have learned from others -- mostly through the words that we did not create.  Every act of thinking employs concepts that have been bequeathed to us by tradition.  The days of thinking of language as a "tool kit" to grasp the objectivity of meaning are long gone.  We know too much.  Our so-called transcendental horizon is not the "unvarnished good news" that Quine once called the "myth of the given."  Just as there is no givenness to experience apart from our historically-conditioned conceptuality by and through which such experience arises, there is no givenness either to transcendental structures of reflection.  Transcendental reflection cannot escape the historicity of experience itself, a historicity that grasps the impossibility of reflecting objectively upon the conditions of reflection itself.  Just as "looks red" presupposes "is red" (Sellars), so does the apprehension of transcendental structures presuppose the conceptuality of such structures, a conceptuality given through language socially.  

Heidegger (1889-1976) famously uncovered the living and breathing ontology through and by which human beings make and live meaning.  We are creatures of meaning embedded within worlds of meaning that we did not construct. We who in our being ask the question of the meaning of being, necessarily ask the question within the historically messy process of the history of being.  Ultimately, Heidegger claimed, our takes on being are themselves a working out of be-ing as it is in and through our thinking.  But, for Heidegger, this Be-ing in its history is no Absolute that can in Hegelian fashion "take up" various understandings of be-ing and somehow come to itself deeply in its own thinking.  The history of Be-ing cannot be the God of the tradition of the Absolute of Hegel, this Be-ing in its history is nowhere and no place, and it cannot be accessed by itself.  It is deeply and necessarily so hidden that Heidegger in speaking it must use the language of "the last God."  

We live in the world beyond the world as it was for us.  This world is not in itself, not for itself, and definitely not in and for itself.  This world is, in fact, worldless.  It is a world suspicious of meta-narratives (Lyotard), of comprehensive attempts to find in the world discrete trajectories of rationality or progress.  

Once there was the a world that really was in itself.  After the death of this world, there was a self that really was in itself.  Post-modernity is the celebration of both the death of the world and the self, a celebration that must be in a certain sense ecstatic because there is no longer a self-possessed self through and by which the self can clearly conceive and pronounce its own death.   Our current time is an age where the screens have overwhelmed the capacity of either the world or the self to manifest themselves clearly upon them. We are without foundations; it is turtles all the way down.  

Living beyond the world in itself is difficult for theology.  God understood along the lines of world or self, could be a God that is still somehow understood.  But when the self lives ecstatically on the basis of concepts and language that are not its own, then there are no places any longer for God to lay His head.  After all, God is by definition incapable of ecstatic existence.  God cannot be carried along or constituted upon differential fields that somehow account for intermittent manifestations of identity.  If anything is, it would seem, God is.  There are no parts to God.  God is that identity by and through which all difference is ultimately understood.  

So what does one do with Christology in an age beyond the age of the world for us?  In our age where all immediacy is blocked, everything that seemingly is, is dependent upon something that it is not.  Just as the identity of the world turned out to be dependent upon that which is different from the world -- its putative transcendental structures -- and the identity of the self turned out to be dependent upon that which is different from the self -- the concepts and language of historically-conditioned social communities -- so too do our fleeting perspectives arising out of particular historically-conditioned social communities find a deeper difference out of which language and thought emerges, a difference that is Other than the historically-conditioned linguistically bequeathed by culture and tradition, a difference that must ultimately be Other than the world and all its putative foundations.  We are very close now to the beginnings of our tradition, a tradition claiming that out of nothing comes something.  

What is needed is to think Christology radically after not only the deconstruction of onto-theology (Heidegger), but the de-structuring itself of that deconstruction.  Thinking Christology beyond the phenomenological presencing that putatively once gave rise to onto-theology, is to bring into focus clearly the Abyss that is either unsupported and provides no support, or unsupported that provides support, or somehow itself supported.  What is Christ in such a situation, and what could a real ontic unity between Christ and the Christian be? But the development of these ideas must await another time.  What is needed is a Christology in a time when the world is not.