The Logic of Transcendental Logic

Immanuel Kant employs transcendental logic to show that the synthesis involved in judging that the conceptual "presentation" (Vorstellung) P applying to the conceptual "presentation" (Vorstellung) S also applies to intuitional presentations (Vorstellungen). In other words, the syntheses involved in the act of judgment in general ultimately make possible the world of our experience, a world in which we know objects. 

According to Kant, while general logic abstracts from the particular content of concepts related, concentrating instead on the formal features involved in relating the concepts, transcendental logic deals with the most general features of our experience of objects in space and time.  Unlike general logic, transcendental logic is not about the capacity for thinking as such, but concerns itself with our thinking in relation to our experience of objects as such.  Accordingly, transcendental logic deals with rules of synthesis in so far as this synthesis applies to intuitions as well as to concepts.  It is left to Kant's transcendental deduction to show that the necessary condition for the possibility of experience as such is that there exists a transcendental unity of apperception, an "I think" that is presupposed in all activity of knowing objects.  

Kant famously offers a transcendental deduction in the first edition of the Critique -- the "A deduction" -- which he completely rewrites in the second edition six years later -- the "B deduction." There is a pronounced difference in emphasis between the two deductions with the first being predominantly a "subjective deduction" while the second attempts an "objective deduction."  

The precise contour of the transcendental arguments are a matter of considerable debate, but one might broadly paint the  "B deduction" as follows: 

• Our experience is one of a succession of awarenesses, that is, a succession of contents of consciousness.

• The condition for a succession of awarenesses, however, is an awareness of the succession itself, that is, the successive contents of consciousness must be combined and held together in a unity of consciousness. Such a unity is a necessary condition for an experience of succession. 

• For this synthesis to be presented (represented), I must think it. 

• But this analytic unity of the self thinking its objects presupposes a synthetic unity of the manifold.  In other words, presupposed is a transcendental unity of apperception, a unity of the "I think" that is neither the empirical "self" of psychology, nor a metaphysical thinking substance a la Descartes. (The "I" could never know itself if it were not possible to unify the manifold through synthesis.)

• The transcendental unity of apperception is an objective, not a subjective, unity.  The conditions for this unity are the conditions by which we have consciousness of objects in general. 

• An object is that under the concept of which the manifold is united.  The necessary conditions for uniting the manifold is a unity of consciousness, a unity that bestows objective affinity to transcendental apperception.  

• Since there is an objective unity in the transcendental unity of apperception, the synthesis must proceed according to the categories and the rules required for experience as such.  

My aim in this brief blog post is not, however, to discuss the differences between the deductions, nor to talk about the differing views on the structure of the deductions within the voluminous secondary literature seeking to understand them. Rather I want to highlight the general modal features of transcendental arguments. I am not the first to do this, of course, but sometimes people reading Kant miss the forest for the trees. Sometimes people simply forget to mention that Kant is engaged in a modal argument of a particular kind.  Let us look at the logical structure of Kant's transcendental argument. 

Kant is interested in the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience as such.  Clearly, the argument is difficult to state if we do not include its modal features.  So what is the argument structure, when these are included? 

• Premise I:  There is the possibility of experience as such.  Using Polish notation of L for the necessity operation and M for the possibility operator, we might say 'Me', experience is possible.  

• Premise II:  It is necessary that, if experience is possible, then there exist conditions C for that experience.   We might express this as 'L, if Me, then o'.  (I am using 'o' for 'conditions'.) 

• Conclusion: Lo. 

Kant is claiming that from the mere possibility of experience we can conclude to some necessary features making possible that experience.  He is not arguing that as a matter of contingent fact some conditions (or other) obtain -- that is, empirical conditions -- that would account for that experience.  He is saying that in each and every possible world, the same conditions C must obtain, if there is a possible world where experience E is had.   

Those familiar with modal logic will understand that Kant is presupposing Lewis' S5 in order to conclude to the necessity of C.  Let us review basic modal systems briefly. 

• We might have a system that might allow us to move from necessity to possibility.  Using Polish notation, we have the distinguishing axiom 'CLpMp', if p is necessary, then p is possible.  (Read the 'C' as the conditional 'if, then', e.g., 'if Lp, then Mp'.) That is, if p obtains in all possible worlds, p obtains in some possible world.  (It is hard to conceive how something appearing in all possible world is not possible, for it is in every world that is, by definition, possible.)

• We could add to this first system another axiom this one from actuality to possibility: 'CpMp', if p obtains then p is possible.  That is to say, if p obtains in the actual world, then p obtains in a possible world.  (This seems plausible since the actual world is a possible world.)

• We can add to this second system another plausible theorem: 'CMMpMp'. We have now arrived at Lewis' system S4 holding that if something is possibly possible, then it is possible.  In other words, if p is possible in a possible world, then p is itself in a possible world.  (This seems plausible since all there are are possible worlds, and it would be strange were something possible in a possible world to somehow not simply be possible.) 

• Finally, we get to S5, sometimes assumed to be the "standard" system of model logic.  This system is generated from 'CLpMp', 'CpMp', CMMpMp' and the distinguishing assumptions of S5, 'CMLpLp', that is, if it is possible that something is necessary, then it is necessary.  Simply put, if there is possible world where some necessity holds, then, since for something to be necessary it obtains in all possible worlds, that which is necessary in that possible world is now ingredient in every possible world. (It is hard to see what being necessary in a possible world might be, if that necessity does not extend over all possible worlds.)  

Those familiar with ontological arguments for the existence of God should immediately recognize the importance of S5. Assume it is possible that God exists. Now reflect on the nature of God. Is God the kind of being that could exist contingently like a rat or an apple, or is God the king of being who, were God to exist, would exist necessarily?  If one's intuitions are of the latter, then God either exists in all possible worlds or in no possible worlds. But how do we know?  We know by checking whether or not God's existence involves a self-contradiction.  If God's existence is self-contradictory, then God does not exist in a single possible world. However, if God's existence is not self-contradictory and God's existence is not contingent, then the very possibility of God existing entails that God exists in all possible worlds including the actual world!  

So how do we apply S5 here?  Let us look at the argument again, and see if we can arrive at the conclusion. 

• Premise I: Me

• Premise II: LCMeo   (This says that necessarily, if possibly e then o.)

• S5 Assumption: CMLpLp

• But (2) is logically equivalent in all modal systems to 'CLMeLo'

•  From(3), 'C~Lp~MLp'. 

• (5) is equivalent to 'CM~pLM~p'. 

• Substituting 'e' for '~p' uniformly, we get, 'CMeLMe'. 

• Thus from (1), we derive 'LMe'. 

• Now by (4) through modus ponens we get 'Lo', and thus 'o' constituted necessary conditions for the possibility of 'e'.  QED. 

It is not immediately apparent what is wrong with this proof. Kant is engaged in critical or immanent metaphysics in the Critique. He is not talking about his believing or knowing primarily, but those states of affairs making true his believing and necessary for his knowing. The transcendental unity of apperception constitutes a necessary condition for any possible experience, that is to say, if there is a world in which there is experience 'e', then there can be no worlds in which transcendental unity fails to obtain.  The very possibility of 'e' entails the necessity of 'o'.  

Now the question of the claim: Is Kant really trying to say that 'o' obtains in all worlds, or simply that there is no world having 'e' that does not have 'o'? Are we saying that worlds in which 'e' does not obtain have 'o'?  In other words, are we asserting a necessity of consequence or a necessity of the thing consequent.  

In the medieval tradition God's foreknowledge was figured as a necessity of consequence, not a necessity of the thing consequent.  If God foreknows that S rejects God, does God's foreknowledge itself logically entail S cannot reject God? The solution was to discriminate the scope of the modal operator.  In worlds in which God foreknows S rejects God, S cannot not reject God.  However, in worlds where God does not have this foreknowledge, then S is presumably not logically determined to reject or not reject.  Are we saying that the transcendental argument is more like a necessity of consequence: In worlds were 'e' occurs, it cannot be that 'o' fails to obtain.  But how about those worlds in which 'e' does not transpire?  Must 'o' be ingredient in them as well?  And if 'o' is not ingredient, then how must we adjust the transcendental argument?  Clearly, these questions motivate a deeper investigation.    

Reflecting on Reflective Judgments and Kant's Attempt to Reconcile His First and Second Critiques

Immanuel Kant famously argued that the categories of cause and substance could only apply to the world of empirical experience.  The pure concepts of the understanding unite the manifold of intuition in ways that deliver to us objects and events in space and time causally connectable to other objects and events.  

To attempt to think metaphysical reality using the categories of cause and substance is, for Kant, to misapply these  concepts beyond the bounds of their proper application.  When these concepts no longer apply to intuitions -- that is to the spatio-temporal particulars resulting in the application of "pure forms of sensibility" of space and time to the realm of things in themselves -- then their use eventuates in a "transcendental subreption" or "transcendental illusion" of thinking metaphysical reality must be structured in the ways in which our thinking conceives this reality. 

By the conclusion of the First Critique, Kant's readers realize that he has indeed provided the necessary philosophical framework to underpin Newtonian mechanics. Instead of holding that substances and causes are in the world apart from human cognition -- and thus being susceptible to the skeptical arguments of David Hume -- Kant places them solidly within the human epistemological domain. While whatever exists apart from us, exists apart from our awareness, perception, conception and language, the empirical order clearly does not. Apart from human beings, there would be no spatio-temporal particulars and no substances which our concepts synthesize from the manifold of sensibility.  The phenomenal world, the only world we can know empirically, is nicely ordered causally because we ourselves apply the category of causality and accordingly order the world causally before we empirically investigate it.  

Kant believes that the only way to save empiricism -- and thus to be an empirical realist -- is to be a transcendental idealist.  If space, time, substantiality and causality were not denizens of our epistemic equipment, the skeptical arguments would finally win the day, and the universality and necessity trumpeted by Newton in his mechanism could never be ultimately justified. In order to have a nature like Newton's, one needed to adopt a transcendental position like Kant's. 

So the story at the end of Kant's First Critique is that nature is closed under the operation of physical causality.  Physical entities, and the events in which they are ingredient, are causally related among themselves. There are no uncaused physical events, and no physical events causing non-physical events. There is no "free play" in the universe. In order to save Newtonian mechanics, Kant gives us an underlying determinism of a mechanical kind. The world of nature must conform to a deterministic mechanism, because our epistemological equipment process the world in this way.  All this is clear. 

But Kant did not want to stop writing books after the Critique of Pure Reason.  In his Critique of Practical Reason, he argues that the things in themselves, which are only mediatedly accessible through knowing the phenomenal world in the First Critique, are immediately and nominally accessible through an encounter with duty and the moral law in the Second Critique. Now the realm of freedom, responsibility and dignity are opened to human beings; we already are living noumenal reality in our moral experience.  While Kant banishes freedom in the First Critique, he gives it back in the Second Critique. The practical postulates of God, immortality and freedom of the Second Critique have no echo in the First Critique.  While the latter is the precondition for encounter with the moral law itself, both God and immortality are postulates needed for a complete moral theory, a theory in which the summum bonum is obtainable, i.e., the "highest good" wherein those doing their virtue and thus "worthy of happiness," can be, in fact, recipients of that happiness. 

Prima facie, the results of the first two Critiques seem to be in tension with each other.  How can a human being with a body possibly have free moral experience when the bodies in and through which that moral experience is had are denizens of the phenomenal realm and its mechanistic determinism? Nobody can do the right thing, it seems, without an act that is somehow physically expressed.  One cannot help a little old lady across the street without a body.  One cannot bring about the good if one cannot bring about anything at all. If nature is the realm of the bodily, and human beings have bodies and presumably act in and through them, then how can one ever do that which is better than some other act. If the phenomenal realm is the realm of "one cannot do other than one did do," and empirical reality is coextensive with the phenomenal, and if human freedom is "one can do other than what one did," then how can freedom be exercised for coporeal human beings?  If one do other than what one does do, then deterministic mechanism is false, and if physical entities cannot do other than what they do, then human freedom is impossible. 

Fortunately, Kant wrote another book, one that is not read as often by philosophers these days, but nonetheless must appear within the top 100 of philosophical classics. This book is entitled Der Kritik der Urteilskraft, translated as The Critique of Judgment, though a better translation would have been The Critique of the Power of Judgment.  In the Introduction to this book, Kant claims that he wishes to reconcile the two earlier Critiques, and introduces the notion of a reflective judgment.  Unlike a determining judgment which operates determinately to think a given particular under a given universal, the reflective judgment is one wherein their is freedom to think a universal on the basis of the particular.  It provides, as it were, some "free play" in understanding the particular.  After introducing this, Kant launches into a wide-ranging and very famous discussion of the notion of beauty and related concepts, followed by a discussion of teleology and purpose in their relationship to the aesthetic.  Many readers become frustrated in the The Critique of Judgment because it does not seem that Kant ever gets around to providing a sustained argument for what is promised: a reconciling of the results of the first two Critiques.  

It is possible, however, to provide an overview of his intended "solution." The relevant sections of the Critique are these: #8 and #9 in the Introduction, and #70 - #85 in the Dialectic of Teleological Judgment and the Methodology of Teleological Judgment.   

In #70 Kant distinguishes reflective and constitutive antinomies.   

• Thesis of reflective judgment: "All production of material things and their forms must be judged to be possible in terms of merely mechanical laws."
• Antithesis of reflective judgement: "Some products of material nature cannot be judged to be possible in terms of merely mechanical laws." 
• Thesis of constitutive judgment: "All production of material things is possible in terms of merely mechanical laws." 
• Antithesis of constitutive judgment: "Some production of material things in not possible in terms of merely mechanical laws." (Pluher, 267, KU 367).
  

 Kant points out the the thesis and antithesis of a constitutive judgment are antinomies or contradictories, i.e., the truth of one entails the falsity of the other.  In other words, they cannot both be true at the same time.  But Kant does not believe that the first two statements are contradictory: 

But if we consider instead the two maxims of a power of judgment that reflects [i.e., the first thesis and antithesis above], the first of these two maxims does in fact not contradict [the second] at all. For if I say that I must judge all events in material nature, and hence also all the forms that are its products, in terms of merely mechanical laws as to [how] they are possible, then I am not saying that there are possible in terms of mechanical laws alone (i.e., even if no other kind of causality comes in).  Rather, I am only pointing out that I ought always to reflect on these events and forms in terms of the principle of the mere mechanism of nature, and hence ought to investigate this principle as far as I can, because unless we presuppose it in our investigation [of nature] we can have no cognition of nature at all in the proper sense of the term" (267-68, 387-88).

What is going on here?  

Clearly, Kant is understanding a reflective judgment to be quite different than a determining or constituting judgment.  In the First Critique, Kant had laid out the transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience as such -- an experiencing of empirical nature in Newtonian ways -- as the determining judgments under which intuitions fall.  The result is a mechanistic determinism.  But does Kant's move to a reflective judgment allow him to escape the charge that just as there is a contradiction between the thesis and antithesis of a constitutive (determining) judgment, so there is a contradiction between the thesis and antithesis of a reflective judgment? Is this not a case of what is good for the goose is good for the gander? 

The key to holding that there is no antinomy in the reflective judgment rests upon the ability of the thinker to recognize that the reflective principles in question are heuristic, that far from "carving the beast of reality at its joints" (Plato), they simply are principle by which we might think nature. We attempt to see nature as entirely deterministic, but it is possible that that we adopt a different principle for regions of our empirical investigations.  (Think of how difficult it would be actually to give a mechanistic/deterministic account of beavers building a dam.  One could not use the category of final causality or employ any implicit purposeful functionalistic explanations, e.g, the beavers are acting this way "in order to" bring about some state of affairs.)  It might allow us to understand more about nature to employ the reflective judgment that "some products of material nature cannot be judged to be possible in terms of merely mechanical laws." Something more is needed. 

Kant reconciles the two reflective judgments because there is supersensible ground allowing both judgments to be used heuristically, if not descriptively.  Kant writes: 

If we are to have a principle that makes it possible to reconcile the mechanical and the teleological principles by which we judge nature, then we must posit this further principle in something that lies beyond both (and hence also beyond any possible empirical presentation of nature), but that nonetheless contains the basis of nature, namely, we must posit it in the supersensible, to which we must refer both kinds of explanation" (297, 412). 

But what is accomplished here?  It seems that the thesis and antithesis of the antinomy of reflective judgment still form a contradiction.  Yet Kant is suggesting that this clear and present contradiction is "taken up" by the reality of the supersensible of which the thesis and the antithesis are partial grasps.  So the supersensible substrate supports a coincedentia oppositorum in a way not unlike how God could only be thought in the mystical traditions through dialectical formulations.  'All P is J' and 'Some P is not J' are contradictories and cannot be other.  However, these contradictions are somehow sustained in the ground of the supersensible.  We are permitted to use either because the nature of the supersensible cannot be articulated by either.  When one says them both, one learns something about that which cannot be known.  

The fundamental problem of philosophy since the time of Decartes has been this: "How is human freedom possible in a determinstic physicalist universe?" Kant is taking on this big question and saying that the problem is one of thinking how it is possible, not it being possible.  It is possible after all, because it is actual.  The supersensible substrate is worked up mediately in the First Critique, more immediately in the Second, and these varying accounts put together in the Third.  We can't do metaphysics, so cannot carve this "beast of reality."  We will always end in antinomies when we do.  But nonetheless the supersensible grounds the possibility of corporeal entities acting freely.  Purposefulness in nature attests to an opening by which freedom can be instantiated in a physical system.  

Kant says that the antinomies of reflective judgment are not antonomies because the truth of one does not entail the falsity of the other.  He might have better started to index judgments to standpoints. Clearly, the antinomies are contradictories for us and how we must think the universe. They are contradictory coram hominibus.  But they are not contradictory from the standpoint of the supersensible. That is, they are not contradictory coram deo -- if we might  apply that term here.  Kant knew that ultimately the tools of human understanding and thinking simply were inadequate to think reality as such.

Where can Teleology find a Home?

Section 79 of Kant's Kritik der Urtheislkraft (Critique of Judgment) poses the following question: What discipline ought to treat teleology? Should it be part of natural science or theology? After pointing out that it can't belong to both and still be a science (Wissenbchaft), Kant offers the following: 

It can't belong to theology. Why? Kant declares:

Denn sie hat Naturerzeugungen und die Ursache derselben zu ihrem Gegenstande, und ob sie gleich auf die letztere, als einen ausser und über die Natur gelegenen Grund (göttlichen Urheber) hinausweiset, so that die dieses doch nicht für die bestimmende, sonder nur (um die Beurteilung der Dinge in der Welt durch eine solche Idee dem menschlichen Verstande angemessen als regulatives Prinzip zu leiten) bloss für die reflectirenede Urteilskraft in der Naturbetrachtung.

What is Kant saying? Since teleological considerations here deal with natural objects and their cause (perhaps a divine cause), no determinative judgment of this divine author is possible. We learned in the First Critique that determinative judgments rightly operate through a "synthesis of the manifold of sensation" in Newtonian ways, that is, in the ways of classical mechanics. 

Determinative judgments will take us to mechanism, but a "goettlichen Urheber" can never be the product of the application of the empirical and pure concepts of the understanding to intuitions (perceptions), and cannot thus appear in the mechanistic web. Thus, while one is free to think there is such a Urheber, this is the result of a reflective judgment which operates by allowing a universal to be freely thought, a universal under which the particular can then fall. [Kant explains in Section IV of the Introduction that when the particular is given and judgment must locate the universal under which it falls, then the power of judgment is reflective ("soll ist die Urtheilskraft bloss reflectierend").] Clearly, teleology does not belong to theology. 

Lamentably, teleology does not belong to natural science either. (I don't think Dembski ever takes on Kant head on, but I have only read some of what he has written.) Kant explains: 

Eben so wenig schient sie aber auch in der Naturwisschenchaft zu gehören, welcher bestimmender und nicht bloss reflektierender Prinzipien bedarf, und von der Naturwirkungen objective Gründe anzugeben. In der That is auch für die Theorie der Natur, oder die mechanische Erklärung der Phänomenon derselben durch ihre wirkende Ursachen dadurch nichts gewonnen, das man sie nach dem Verhältnisse zu Zwecke zu einander betrachtet.

Kant points to the reason why explanations in terms of purpose are dubious in natural science: They disclose nothing about the origination and the inner possibility of the natural forms -- "ueber dass Entstehen und innere Moeglichkeit dieser Formen gar keinen Aufschluss giebt" -- about which theoretical science is concerned. So teleology can not belong to natural science either. Has teleology thus no home? 

As it turns out, teleology does not concern doctrine but Kritik. It concerns "zwar eines besonderen Erkenntnissvermoegens, namlich die Urteilskraft." Teleology concerns the a priori, and thus, can accordingly be regulative of our thinking in the sciences, a regulative thinking that is largely negative. After all, we cannot specify final causes as theoretical objects in our mature scientific theory. However, purposefulness must, in a sense, form the context within which the text of mature naturalistic mechanistic scientific theorizing operates. 

We must remember for the mature Kant, teleological and mechanistic reasoning is grounded in the same thing: the Supersensible. This quote from Section 78 makes all of this quite clear: 

Nun ist aber das gemeinschaftliche Prinzip der mechanischen einerseits und der teleologischen Ableiten andrerseits das Übersinnliche, welches wir der Natur als Phänomen unterlegen müssen.

The Supersensible mediately accessible through the pure and empirical concepts of the understanding in the First Critique, and immediately encountered in the determinations of freedom in the Second Critique, is both "an und fuer sich" through the reflective judgments of the Third Critique. (Or one might so interpret it.) 

But were there a principle that dealt not with the simple material denizens of the res extensa nor the simple mental reality of the res cogitans, but with that neutral monistic reality from which both emerge, would it not after all demand a new "Erkenntnisvermoegens," one which drives toward that way that Heidegger would later evoke as a "thinking which is a thanking?" 

At the Institute of Lutheran Theology, we try to think about things, and we try to think about our thinking of things. Without reverence in the face of the Supersensible, gods become ultimately engineered by, and thus, possessed by the thinker. But Kant, who loved autonomy, nevertheless understood that thinking responds to what is deeper. It can never possess that Abgrund over which it has been fashioned to think. To think that it does is, of course, the ground of idolatry, superstition and ultimately blasphemy. Kant was, of course, a staunch enemy of all of these.

Indeterminate Realism versus Phenomenological Ontology

We received word late yesterday (November 15, 2018) from our accrediting agency that we could begin offering our Ph.D. at the Institute of Lutheran theology in the fall of 2019.  As the founding President of the Institute of Lutheran Theology (ILT), and having taken it from its early very tenuous years through accreditation, and now to this milestone, I wish to express my sincere thanks to all who have worked so diligently on this project.  We have always done what we do to the glory of God, because the search for truth is its own reward.

I wrote this reflection earlier this week, and offer it up now in the spirit of truth.  Clearly, blog writing is not meant to be scholarly writing with citations like one would find in a academic journal.  That being said, I do think all I say below can be supported by the appropriate texts.  As always, I am interested in any responses you might want to share on the blog.
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I remember once having a rather protracted discussion with Langdon Gilkey (1919-2004) in a Des Moines church basement sometime around 1994.  At that time, he would have been 75 years old.  Like many, I had read Naming the Whirlwind in the early1970s, and had been impressed with the issues Langdon had raised on the future possibility of God-talk.  Gilkey had given a talk reflecting on his teacher Paul Tillich that night in the church basement, and I wanted to talk to him about how I was understanding Tillich in those days.

Paul Tillich (1885-1965) wrote a number of widely-read books in the 1950s, including two that I regularly taught undergraduates, The Dynamics of Faith (1956) and The Courage to Be (1952).  (I never had undergraduates read his Systematic Theology.)  In both of those texts, Tillich had employed the notion of the "Ground of Being" in tandem with the "Power of Being," and the "depth of Being," distinguishing them all in The Dynamics of Faith from the "Structure of Being."

The Ground of Being, for Tillich in the 1950s, was the source of existential empowerment in the face of the fundamental anxieties of existence, the anxiety of fate and death, the anxiety of guilt and condemnation, and the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness.   In those days, I admit to thinking that Tillich was committed to a phenomenological ontology, and that the Ground of Being simply could not be any "thing" at all.  It was both Ground and Abyss, the Depth of Being whose function it was to be pointed to by religious symbols, and which somehow provided the "courage to be in spite of the fact of non-being," that is, that "negation of the negation of being" that provided being (through courage) existentially in the face of the non-being of existential anxiety.  Whereas a phenomenological ontology could describe the structure of being, it could only point to that indeterminate reservoir of empowerment potential transcending that structure.

I remember talking to Langdon about this, trying to gauge what, in fact, Tillich's view on the Ground of Being was. I thought that perhaps Tillich himself knew that his phenomenological ontology pointed to a Ground of Being that could only be in and for consciousness, that as the reservoir of empowerment, it could not in any way be what it is apart from consciousness.  In other words, I thought that Tillich would have to hold that if consciousness were not present, the Ground of Being could not exist either.  I remember Gilkey listening earnestly to me and saying, "I think Tillich would never think of the Ground of Being in that way.  After all, the Ground of Being for Paul was a real thing."  He then said to me, "if you want to understand what Paul was talking about, you have to read Schelling."  Since reading Schelling seriously was not then on my immediate to-do list, I admit to continuing to think that Tillich must finally be understood in the lineage of Martin Heidegger.  Surely, his thought was not somehow indebted to one of Schelling's Five Systems.  Was he not better understood as a thinker of his own age -- at least when he was thinking clearly like he was surely doing in the last 15 years of his life?

I have been talking about realism in theology these last years because I have thought profoundly important this claim:  A thing is real if and only if that thing exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.   Applied to God, this is the claim that God is not real unless God's existence is what it is apart from human existence, that is to say, if and only if the existence of human beings is logically independent of God's existence.  It thus seemed that one would have to adopt irrealism in theology if one were to ground one's theology in a phenomenological ontology.   Irrealism is the simple denial of realism, the assertion that "it is not the case that God exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language."

It had been clear to me for some time that that if theology was going to be about something important, i.e., about that which the tradition had assumed it was about, it would have to make causal claims about salvation, claims of the type that "X would not have been saved  -- however one construes this -- apart from the real existence and action of God."  If Bob's existential empowerment could have occurred even were it not the case that the Ground of Being existed apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, then it could not rightly be claimed that this salvific empowerment was caused by God.  One might claim it was caused by some aspect of us, some depth of our own being with which we are not normally in contact.

It has also seemed to me for a very long time that God cannot be God if God were only a metaphysical absolute.  The God that is the God of Christianity is tied to action, I thought, to acting so as aid God's children, to, as Tillich might say, "negate the negations of being." 

This being said, ground of being theologies do have great metaphysical appeal.  Wesley Wildman rightly points to their fascination: "They deny that ultimate reality is a determinate entity, and they deny that the universe is ontologically self-explanatory" (See "Ground-of-Being Theologies," in the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science).  My opinion is, however, that while the metaphysical absolute can be intellectually satisfying in myriad ways, if there is no salvific causal connection or metaphysical dependency relation that can be drawn from the Ground of Being to possible human transformation, then Ground of Being ontologies are not really helpful for the religious quest. 

As I was thinking about the development of post-Kantian options for theology in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, I became quite uneasy with many of the moves, because they seemed mostly to be consistent with theological irrealism.  What difference would it even make if there were a God that exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language if empowerment in the face of the fundamental existential anxieties did not even involve God?  What difference would it make were there to exist a God that was soteriologically inert?  God could, after all, have abstract existence, perhaps like the set of all ordered pairs, but if God were not related to the universe or people in it such that if God had not existed the salvific options of people would not be different, then in what sense is it even important to say that God is?
 
As an instance of possible irrealism, consider how it is possible that one can preach Law and Gospel, and deliver Christ in the sermon so that the grace of God is delivered in the forgiveness of sins without assuming the existence of God at all.  If one presupposes a phenomenological ontology, the forgiveness proclaimed and received in the Word can be understood in terms of a change in the ontological linguisticallity of existence.  If what it is to be is to be in a world in which one dwells in relationship to beings and values, then a linguistic event like preaching really can change one's world.  One perhaps is donated a being-in-the-world which would not have happened apart from the event of preaching.  The effects on the reader of Scripture, the hearer of the sermon, and the recipient of the sacrament could clearly be interpreted as not involving the action of some divine being.  If language itself is performative and the linguistic event empowers, then why assert some other being, disconnected from the event whose action would vouchsafe for the success of the event's reception?

But what if Langdon Gilkey is right about Tillich, and that I really should have studied more deeply Schelling, or perhaps the later works of Kant whom Fichte and Schelling wholly devoured?  While I have spent quite a bit of time in both The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Practical Reason, I have never spent sufficient time with The Critique of Judgment, Kant's last great work of 1790.   I have lately decided to read the work closely, and I now see how and why it was that both Fichte, Schelling, as well as a whole host of other philosophers, believed that Kant's greatest work was, in fact, the Critique of Judgment.  The Critique of Pure Reason is very important, of course, but the options for philosophical and theological development from that work in an age threatened by mechanism were understandably limited.  However, the Critique of Judgment with its emphasis on aesthetics and purpose seemed extremely relevant to the challenges of the early 19th century: How can one find unity, purpose and meaning in a natural universe in which everything that happens seems to be the result of some congeries or concatenation of events antecedently occurring?

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant attempts to find a linkage between the mechanism resulting from the understanding's theoretical cognition of nature and freedom resulting from practical cognition of the power of desire.  The problem is the apparent antinomy between the assertion that all natural events are necessarily determined by other natural events and the claim that there are some events which are natural that are nonetheless not wholly determined by other natural events.  After all, when confronted by the decision to either go to the party of stay home, Molly is immediately aware of her freedom not to go as the very presupposition for her thinking that she ought not to go party.  Molly is a being in the world who is caused to behave as she does by her antecedent conditioning, but who nonetheless has the freedom to do other that what she did do.  But how can all natural events have a cause in nature, when Molly is a natural being involved in natural events and she sometimes acts in ways seemingly determined by no natural events at all?  How is the freedom of a human being, whose being is embodied in nature, possible?

Kant attempts to solve this antinomy by arguing that nature deals only with appearances, and so the appearance of determinism is not in conflict with the underlying freedom encountered in practical reason's grasp of its own duty.  The freedom encountered by the reason in its moral life is not a freedom, however, solely resting in the subject.  It is a freedom determined by reason's grasp of the supersensible substrate that exists both inside and outside the subject, a supersensible substrate that is indeterminate in itself, but is determined in moral experience.  For Kant, however, there is a power of judgment which operates to make determinable the indeterminate supersensible subtrate, a determinability that is possible on the side of the object, that is, a determinability applicable to the entire supersensible substrate, not just that encountered by the subject.

In an important section of the Critique of Judgment, Kant argues that the transcendental notion of purpose applied to nature is finally no mere thinking of purpose on the side of the subject when thinking nature, a thinking that would be the subject's imposition of purpose upon nature, but it is a thinking itself grounded in the indeterminate supersensible substrate, a real supersensible substrate which is what it is, and in the application of judgment to it, can allow the thinking of purpose in nature.

It is impossible, of course, to think what is indeterminate, however, Kant does laud Judgment's ability to think the world as if it were designed by God and as if this God had placed the human effort towards fulfillment of the moral law as the highest good of this creation.  While Kant knows that he cannot argue metaphysically for the real existence of this God without running into the antinomies, he does realize that human beings are allowed to think of the world of nature as if it is the result of objective purpose built into it by God, an objective purpose designed by God allowable on the basis or ground (Grund) of the supersensible substrate.  This substrate cannot be thought for there are no universals under which any supersensible intuitions might fall.  It is not able to be articulated by human beings, but it itself is that upon which analogies arise, analogies that allow human beings to think of nature as the field of moral activity without at the same time having to deny the results of the First Critique.

What does all of this mean?  Well maybe Ground of Being theologies yet hold some hope if we can connect them to a Kantian supersensible substrate.  If the Ground of Being underlying the Structure of Being is the supersensible substrate, an indeterminate noumenality that is the real reservoir of a power of being at the depth of being, a real reservoir of empowerment potential that can truly address the anxieties of fate and death, guilt and condemnation, and emptiness and meaninglessness, then perhaps we can read the entire tradition of theology based upon Kant a bit differently.  There would be, after all, a God, and that God would do stuff.  Its upon that God's basis that we could proclaim that God was indeed in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.  It is upon that Ground that the grace of Jesus Christ would be proclaimed and it is upon that really existing being that we could proclaim forgiveness and witness transformed lives.  It is upon that Ground that the Spirit would blow when and where it wills, and that the play of the Trinitarian persons could be entertained.  It is upon that Ground of divine simplicity that we could think the great thoughts of the Trinitarian tradition, a Ground deeper than substance but which is the true cause (Grund) of all that is. Maybe such an indeterminate realism is what the apophantic tradition was after all along. 

Kant's Argument for Purpose and the Notion of the Highest Good as the Solution to the Problem of Freedom and Nature

In his Second Introduction to Die Kritik der Urtheilskraft (1790), Kant declares:

"The understanding (Verstand), inasmuch as it can give laws to nature a priori, proves that we cognize nature only as appearance (Erscheinung), and hence at the same time points to a supersensible substate of nature (auf ein uebersinnliches Substrat derselben); but it leaves this substate wholly undetermined.  Judgment, through its a priori principle of judging nature in terms of possible particular laws of nature, provides nature's supersensible substrate (within as well as outside us) with determinability by the intellectual power (Bestimmbarkeit durch das intellectuelle Vermoegen).  But reason, through its a priori practical law, gives this same substrate determination (Bestimmung).  Thus judgment makes possible the transition (Uebergang) from the domain of the concept of nature to that of the concept of freedom" (Kant, Pluhar translation, 37/Kritik der Urtheilskraft, S. 196-7).

Kant's claims are these:

• The understanding, by giving laws to nature a priori, points to an undetermined supersensible substrate.
• Judgment, by judging nature a priori in terms of possible particular laws of nature, provides nature a determinability through its intellectual power.  
• Reason, by its a priori use of practical law, provides the substrate determination.  
• Judgment makes possible transition from the domain of the concept of nature to that of the concept of freedom. 

The supersensible substrate, which is undetermined by the understanding, is determined by reason.  How can that which is undetermined by understanding be nonetheless determined by reason?  Kant argues that judgment links the understanding and reason by providing the undetermined supersensible substrate the very possibility of determination. The undetermined cannot be determined without it having the disposition for determination.  Judgment somehow provides the supersensible the disposition for determination without itself being the actualization of that disposition.  Kant is saying, in effect, that judgment confers potential determination on the supersensible, a potentiality actualized in the employment of reason in its practical use.  But how is this all possible?  Kant argues that the condition for this possibility is the ultimate purpose for the world.  

In Section 86 entitled "Ethicotheology," Kant discusses what ultimately makes the world valuable by considering the notion of final purpose (Endzweck).  He denies that human contemplation (Betrachtung) and cognition (Erkenntnissvermoegen) of the world is sufficient to give the world value (Pluhar, 331/Die Kritik, S. 442: 22-29).  Rather, he claims that "only if we presupposed that the world has a final purpose (einen Endzweck derselben voraussetzen), could its contemplation itself have a value by reference to that purpose (die Weltbetrachtung selbst einen Werth haben)" (331/442).  Accordingly, he staunchly rejects any view that would claim that the final purpose of creation is the feeling of pleasure (der Gefuehl der Lust) that humans might have or develop, or human well-being (Wohlsein), or physical or intellectual enjoyment (Genuss), or ultimately, happiness (Glueckseligkeit) (331/442).  Kant writes: 

"For the fact that man, once he exists, makes happiness his own final intention (Endabsicht) gives us no concept [that tells us] for what end he exists at all, and what his own value is, on account of which his existence should be made agreeable to him (angenehm zu machen).  Therefore, we must already presuppose that man is the final purpose of creation, if we are to have a rational basis (Vernunftgrund) of why nature, considered as an absolute whole in terms of principles of purposes (ein absolutes Ganze nach Principien der Zweck betrachtet wird), should have to harmonize with [the goal of achieving] his happiness (zu seiner Glueckseligkeit zusammen stimmen muesse)" (331-32/442-43).   

Kant is saying that the only way rationally to account for how nature as a whole with its biological teleologies should harmonize with the human goal of happiness is to posit that human beings themselves constitute the final purpose of creation.   He further suggests that human beings have value and the world has final purpose through the "power of desire" (Begehrungsvermoegen).  This "power of desire" does not rest on what human beings might enjoy, but rather concerns the human exercise of freedom, an exercise that is tied to the good will.  Kant declares that this "good will is that through which human existence alone can have absolute worth (absoluten Werth), and in relation to which the existence of the world can have final purpose (Endzweck)" (Die Kritik, S. 443:10-13). 

Kant believes that it is through the good will that the universe has a final purpose.  The moral life of men and women is the final purpose for which nature exists at all.  Kant, however, realizes that a chain of final purposes can be organized according to the relation of "conditions" and the final purpose of human existence is, in some sense, "conditioned" by a higher purpose.  In such a concatenation, one most isolate the unconditional final purpose on the basis of which other final purposes are conditioned.  By acknowledging human beings to be the purpose of creation, there is a rational ground to regard the world as a whole as a system of final causes (die Welt als ein nach Zwecken zusammenhaengendes Ganz und als System von Endursachen anzusehen) (Die Kritik, S. 444:3-4).  Kant writes: 

" . . . we now have . . .  a basis (Grund), or at least the primary condition (Hauptbedingung), for regarding the world as a whole that coheres in terms of purposes (nach Zwecken zusammenhaengendes Ganze), and as a system of final causes (von Endursachen anzusehen). . . in referring natural purposes to an intelligent world cause (verstaendige Weltursache), as the character of our reason forces us to do, we now have a principle that allows us to conceive of the nature and properties of the first cause, i.e., the supreme basis of the kingdom of purposes (obersten Grundes im Reich der Zwecke) and hence allows us to give determination to the concept of this cause (den Begriff derselben zu bestimmen).  Physical teleology was unable to do this; all it could do was to give rise to concepts of this supreme basis that were indeterminate (unbestimmte) and on that very account were inadequate (untaugliche) for both theoretical and practical use" (Pluhar, 333/Die Kritik S. 444:2-11).  

Kant believes we must think this being not simply as intelligence (Intelligenz) and as giving laws to nature (gesetzgebend fuer die Natur), but as a sovereign (Oberhaupt) that gives laws in a moral kingdom of purposes.  In relation to the highest possible good (Gut) -- the existence of rational beings under moral laws -- we must think this primal being (Urwesen) as omniscient (allwissend), as omnipotent (allmaechtig), and as omnibenevolent (allguetig) and just (gerecht).  Kant believes the latter two conditions are necessary if we are to think the highest cause of the world as constituting the highest good under moral laws.  The same is true of all the transcendental properties, e.g., eternity and omnipresence (Allgegenwart), etc., which are presupposed by final purpose.  Kant argues that "in such a way, moral teleology supplements (ergaenzt) what physical teleology lacks, and for the first time grounds a theology" (Die Kritik S. 444: 13-29).    

Kant then concludes that the principle that allows us to relate the world to a supreme cause (oberste Ursache), is itself sufficient, and by driving our attention to the purposes of nature and in investigating the great art (grossen Kunst) lying hidden under nature's forms, the ideas that pure practical reason supplies (herbeischafft) might find incidental (beilaeufige) confirmation (Bestaetigung) in natural purposes (Naturzwecken) (Die Kritik, S. 445:1-4).  The notion of a highest being giving laws to the moral kingdom of purposes is necessary to connect the ideas of pure practical reason --ideas that have according to Kant's First Critique no echo in the physical universe -- nonetheless to nature via the notion of natural purposes.  A universe ordered teleologically is not ultimately alien to a purposeful moral agent.  It is, in fact, the kind of place in which a purposeful moral agent might dwell.  The universe and the beings inhabiting it are teaming with purpose.  Moreover, the moral kingdom of purposes require a highest being giving laws to both it and nature, a being that can and must be thought if freedom is ever to be present in and through nature. 

For Kant, Judgment is the faculty by which the indeterminate supersensible substrate might become determinable, that is, that it might be made capable of determination by pure practical reason.  But is this supersensible substrate the noumenal?  Or is it a transcendental concept, i.e., a transcendental condition for thinking how freedom and nature might be connected, a  concept that is itself not the noumenal?  If the latter, then it is determinable on the basis of itself being a concept capable of predication.  But if this is so, then the determinability of the concept is of a different order than the indeterminateness of the noumenal.  Since the noumenal remains undetermined, there is no ultimate bridge between freedom and nature.   While they can be thought together, at the ontological level they remain wholly disparate.  An unbridgeable dualism remains.  So what is that which unifies the fissure between freedom and nature?  Is it the idea of God, or is it God Himself?  It is to the oft-neglected "moral proof of the existence of God" in Die Kritik der Urtheilkraft that we turn in the next post.  

Kant and The Putative Contradiction between Determinism and Freedom, and the Move towards Common Ground

As is well-known, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) wrote two very famous works that seem to give very different results.  Like many who have studied philosophy, I have spent considerable time in the texts of both his First and Second Critiques, but never seriously in his Third.

Of course, I have known for a very long time what is in his 1790 Die Kritik der Urtheilskraft.  It is, after all,  famous for its position on the subjective universality of aesthetic judgments; its development of the concept of beauty with its "four moments" that include disinterestedness, universality, necessity, and feeling; and his development of teleology and highlighting of purpose.  One can read parts of the work and be alternately convinced and puzzled by Kant's arguments.  I have known also that Kant thought that somehow his Third Critique could address the putative fissure between the results of his first two tomes, though I have not hitherto tried to examine carefully the specific arguments by which he tries to establish this.  What I write below is my first step in trying to correct this deficiency.

The Kritik der reinen Vernunft from 1781 (first edition) and 1787 (second edition) argued persuasively that all empirical objects, properties, relations and events are constituted by the Understanding (Der Verstand), that is, that the pure and empirical concepts of the understanding ultimately work to "synthesize the manifold of sensation" such that the denizens of the empirical domain can be known in their universality and necessity.  While Kant speaks of the Ding an sich (thing-in-itself), he realizes we have no epistemic access to it.  But while the nomenal realm of the things-in-themselves cannot be known, the phenomenal realm of things-as-they-are-for-us -- things as they have been constituted by, and given to consciousness -- is epistemically accessible.  We can know the latter, but not the former.   What we know is a domain whose inhabitants are connected by strict causal laws.  There are, accordingly, no uncaused events in this domain.  All that happens is a result of other things that have happened.  Accordingly, a mechanical determinism characterizes the phenomenal order of the Ding fuer uns ("thing-for-us").

The Kritik der praktischen Vernunft from 1788 argued persuasively that human beings are immediately confronted by duty, and that in the face of this duty they are free: The fact that one ought to do X presupposes that one is free to do X.  Ought implies the freedom to do; ought implies can.  (Try to think of a situation where it can meaningfully said that something ought to be done when there is no ability for what has not been done to have been other than it is.)  Famously, Kant argues that we are confronted with a categorical imperative that while empty of content, formally gives conditions of universality, impartiality, and necessity.  His subjective maxims of the categorical imperative are these: 1) So act such that in your act, your act can become a universal law of humanity, 2) So act always to treat the other as an end-in-itself and not as a means to one's own end.  But this action requires freedom, a conclusion seemingly incompatible with the results of the First Critique.

Palpably, if there is one or more free acts in the universe, then the mechanistic determinism of the First Critique is wrong.  Conversely, if all events are determined in accordance with strict natural laws, as Kantian universality and necessity seem to imply, then the freedom of the Second Critique is incorrect.  How might this tension be mitigated?

In his Kritik der Urtheilskraft, Kant takes up this issue, particularly in Section IX of his second Introduction that deals with how judgment can connect the legislations of the understanding and reason.  There is a footnote in this section where Kant explains how it is that the results of the first two Critiques are not in opposition with each other.  Because of the difficulty of the argument, I shall often quote it in the original German, offer my own translation of relevant portions, and analyze what it is the Kant is attempting to do.  It is hard enough to understand exactly what Kant means when he is writing in his own language employing his own technical vocabulary.  I believe that the task only becomes more challenging when trying to read him in translation where the attempt to render him intelligible in English has sometimes occluded the precision of that vocabulary.  Here is the footnote:

"Einer von den verschiedenen vermeinten Widersprüchen in dieser gänzlichen Unterscheidung der Naturcausalität von der durch Freiheit ist der, da man ihr den Vorwurf macht: daß, wenn ich von Hindernissen, die die Natur der Causalität nach Freiheitsgesetzen (den moralischen) legt, oder ihre Beförderung durch dieselbe rede, ich doch der ersteren auf die letztere einen Einfluß einräume. Aber wenn man das Gesagte nur verstehen will, so ist die Mißdeutung sehr leicht zu verhüten. Der Widerstand, oder die Beförderung ist nicht zwischen der Natur und der Freiheit, sondern der ersteren als Erscheinung und den Wirkungen der letztern als Erscheinungen in der Sinnenwelt; und selbst die Causalität der Freiheit (der reinen und praktischen Vernunft) ist die Causalität einer jener untergeordneten Naturursache (des Subjekts, als Mensch, folglich als Erscheinung betrachtet), von deren Bestimmung das Intelligible, welches unter der Freiheit gedacht wird, auf eine übrigens (eben so wie eben dasselbe, was das übersinnliche Substrat der Natur ausmacht) unerklärliche Art den Grund enthält" (Kritik der Urteilskraft, S. 195, fn.)

Kant points out here one of the objections to his finding no contradiction between the causality of nature and freedom is this:  "When I speak about obstacles that nature lays in the way of the laws of freedom (moral laws), or the furthering of the same, I thus concede that the former has an influence on the latter."  Kant says, however, that this is a misinterpretation of his position, a misunderstanding that is easy to avoid it.  He continues, "The resistance (Widerstand) or furtherance (Befoerderung) is not between nature and freedom, but between the former as an appearance and the effects of the latter as an appearance in the world of sense (Sinnenwelt)."  Kant is clearly explaining that this is not a situation of nature and freedom in conflict.  Rather, the apparent conflict occurs between appearances, i.e., between the appearance that is nature and the appearance of the effects of freedom.  

Kant then declares that "the causality of freedom (of pure and practical reason) is the causality of that subsumed natural cause -- the subject, as a human being, thus considered as an appearance."  He further explains that in the determination (Bestimmung) of this natural cause, "the intelligible, which is thought under [the concept] of freedom, contains a ground (Grund) in an unexplained way -- even as the same comprises the supersensible substrate of nature."  

Kant is claiming that freedom and nature do not conflict because in some sense both are appearances of an underlying reality which, though it itself cannot be explicated, nonetheless grounds the intelligible, that is, a reflective judgment of freedom, a judgment that humans can think, and in that thinking locate the perspective by which freedom and nature do not conflict.

But can we become clearer on what Kant is saying?  How does this all cohere with Kant's examination of both aesthetic and teleological judgments that comprise most of the Kritik der Urtheilskraft?  

In light of the footnote above, I want to read closely Section IX of Kant's second Introduction to the Kritik.  While it does not provide a detailed explanation of how the intelligibility of the judgment linking the domains of nature and freedom connects to the ground of the supersensible, it does nicely lay out the direction in which an explanation might take us.  Kant begins the section by distinguishing the understanding and reason.  Because the German is straightforward, I quote Werner Pluhar's translation as follows:  

"The understanding legislates a priori for nature, as object of sense, in order to give rise to theoretical cognition of nature in a possible experience.  Reason legislates a prior for freedom and for freedom's own causality, in other words, for the supersensible in the subject, in order to give rise to unconditioned practical cognition" (Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, p. 35/Kritik, S. 195:4-8).  

This statement of the results of the First and Second Critiques is followed by what I shall call Kant's independence axiom:

"The concept of freedom determines nothing with regard to our theoretical cognition of nature, just as the concept of nature determines nothing with regard to the practical laws of freedom: and to this extent it is not possible to throw a bridge from one domain to the other (eine Bruecke von einem Gebiete zu dem anderen hinueberzuschlagen) (Critique, p. 35-6/Kritik, S. 195:13-16).  

But he then qualifies this statement of independence with this startling assertion that I must quote in the original German: 

"Allein wenn die Bestimmungsgründe der Causalitaet nach dem Freiheitbegriffe . . . gleich nicht in der Natur belegen sind, und das Sinnliche das Übersinnliche im Subjekte nicht bestimmen kann: so ist dieses doch umgekehrt . . . möglich and schon in dem Begriffe eine Causalitaet durch Freiheit enthalten, deren Wirkung diesen ihren formalen Gesetzen Gemäß in der Welt geschehen soll . . .(Kritik, S. 195:17-24)." 

Kant declares that "even though the grounds of the determination of causality according to the concept of freedom do not lie in nature, and the sensible cannot thus determine the supersensible
in the subject, the converse is possible, and already in this concept, a causality through freedom is contained, [a causality] whose effect must happen in the world according to its [freedom's] formal laws."  Clearly, Kant is saying that the supersensible can somehow determine the sensible in conformity with the formal laws of freedom.  This is a bold claim for the one who wrote persuasively in his Kritik der reined Vernunft  that metaphysics has been shipwrecked on the shores on reason's antinomies.  The "supersensible" clearly smacks of metaphysics, does it not?  But Kant is not done:  

" . . . obzwar das Wort Ursache, von dem Übersinnlichen gebraucht, nur dem Grund bedeutet, die Causalitaet der Naturdinge zu einer Wirkung gemäß ihren eigen Naturgesetzen, zugleich aber doch auch mit dem formalen Princip der Vernunftgesetze einhellig zu bestimmen, . . .  (Kritik, S. 195:24-27).  

Kant is pointing out that when the word 'cause' is used with respect to the supersensible, we mean only the ground (Grund) determining the causality of natural things to bring about an effect according to their own laws of nature, and at the same time to do so in conformity with the formal principle of the laws of reason.  By qualifying his assertion in this way, Kant seeks to avoid a metaphysical claim.  'Cause' used here is not a usage according to the pure concepts of the understanding or the pure ideas of reason, but instead points to a basis or ground in the noumenal by which casual connections can be drawn in the phenomenal, a basis or ground that at the same time can allow these causal connections to obtain in a way consistent with the laws of reason in the moral order.  It is a use that is possible for reflective judgment, not for the theoretical judgments of the First Critique.  It is a use that nonetheless allows for the fact that we have no insight into how this is possible (wovon die Moeglichkeit zwar night eingesehen).   

It is important to recall at this point Kant's distinction between determinative and reflective judgments.  While the theoretical exercise of pure reason and the practical use of pure practical reason employ the former, the second type of judgment is saved mostly for the kinds of concerns Kant examines in the Third Critique, e.g., aesthetics and teleology.  In a determinative judgment, the universal is that which is known and which determines the particular in accordance with it.  In a reflective judgment, however, it is the particular which is known and one is allowed thereby freely to think a universal (identifies a universal) under which the particular might fall.   

It is in such a judgment that Kant then connects this supersensible ground to the concept of purpose.  It is through a final cause that freedom and the world of nature in which it is advanced must exist. In lines that clearly suggest the development of Fichte that will soon follow, Kant writes: 

"Die Wirkung nach dem Freiheitsbegriffe ist der Endzweck, der (oder dessen Erscheinung in der Sinnenwelt) existieren soll, wozu die Bedingung der Möglichkeit desselben in der Natur (des Subjects als Sinnenwesens, nämlich als Mensch) vorausgesetzt wird" (Kritik, S. 195:30 - 196:3).   

Purpose is the effect according to the concept of freedom, which must exist in the sensible world, and which is presupposed by the condition for the possibility in nature of human beings, subjects that are denizens of the sensible.  He continues: 

" . . . die Urteilskraft giebt den vermittelnden Begriff zwischen den Naturbegriffen und dem Freiheitsbegriffe, der die Übergang von der reinen theoretischen zur der praktischen, von der Geseztsmaessigkeit nach der ersten zum Endzwecke nach dem letzten möglich macht, in dem Begriff einer Zweckmässigkeit der Natur an der Hand; Den dadurch wird die Möglichkeit des Endzwecks, der allein in der Natur und mit Einstimmung ihrer Gesetze wirklich werden kann, erkannt" (Kritik, S. 196:4-11).  

The power of judgment provides a mediating concept between the concepts of nature and freedom.  It is the concept of the purposiveness of nature that makes possible a transition from the theoretical to the practical, from the lawfulness of nature to the purpose of the practical.  We can know only through the possibility of a final purpose (Endzwecks) how freedom is actualizable in accordance with the laws of nature.  The understanding which determines the phenomenal order leaves the supersensible substrate of nature undetermined.  While reason in its practical use according to the moral laws does determine this substrate, it cannot point to how freedom might be thought actualizable in nature.  Kant declares: 

"Die Urteilskraft verschafft durch ihr Princip a priori die Beurteilung der Natur nach möglichen besonderen Gesetzen derselben ihrem übersinnlichen Substrat (in uns sowohl als ausser uns) Bestimmbarkeit durch das intellektuelle Vermögen. Die Vernunft aber giebt eben demselben durch ihr praktisches Gesetz a priori die Bestimmung; und so macht die Urteilskraft den Übergang von Gebiete des Naturbegriffs zu dem Freiheitsbegriffs möglich" (Kritik, S. 196:15-22).     

It is the power of judgment that, through its own a priori principle, judges nature according to its possible particular laws, and accordingly possesses the intellectual capability (intellektuelle Vermoegen) to give the supersensible substrate determinability (Bestimmbarkeit).  This determinability of the supersensible substrate links to the determination (Bestimmung) by practical reason of that same supersensible substate.  Judgment thus allows the transition from the domain of the concept of freedom to that of the concept of nature.   

What Kant is saying is that judgment is free to think the notion of a final purpose under which both moral freedom and the determinism of nature might fall.  One can conceive of a ground -- though not articulate its structure -- under which its determination of nature, and its determinability by practical reason is possible.  The intelligibility of this ground in uns sowohl als ausser uns is found in the final purpose for which nature and freedom exist.  Our permission contemplatively to think nature as purposeful allows us to think how it is that a purposeful moral agent might exercise freedom in the domain of nature.  Ultimately, it is only the appearance of nature that stands in opposition to the life of the moral subject.  In reality, the deepest nature of that nature is consonant with our moral strivings.  

How could it be that the fissure between freedom and nature is overcome?  It is simply that we must penetrate beyond the mere appearance of their opposition and grasp the identity of their ground in the seeming disparate difference of their domains.  With this move, Kant, and not Fichte, palpably becomes the true father of German Idealism.  

To achieve more clarity on the nature of purpose and teleology for his program of finding an underlying unity between nature and freedom, however, demands that we examine carefully relevant selections of pertinent texts in Part II of the Kritik der Urtheilskraft on teleology.  I shall return to this task in a later post. 

Reflections on Kant's Quest for the Unity of Reason

I first came to Kant as an undergraduate student, trying to read a text I found at the library with the interesting title, The Critique of Pure Reason.  I recall attempting to figure out what Kant meant by the analytic/synthetic distinction and why he thought it so important.  I liked metaphysics even then, I must admit, and was accordingly puzzled why Kant was so chary of it.

I also vividly remember taking in my last undergraduate semester a course entitled "Freedom and Determinism," in which I wrote a paper complaining that Kant could and ought not be a half-way determinist.  If the results of the First Critique are a thoroughgoing mechanistic determinism, then clearly there is no freedom, certainly not the freedom Kant extols in his Critique of Practical Reason.  I was an incompatibilist back then, I suppose, for I thought that if all acts are determined, then there can be no contra-causal freedom and philosophical libertarianism is false, and conversely, if some actions are contra-causally free -- philosophical libertarianism is true -- then not all acts are determined.

Compatibilism was, I thought, simply a lack of courage.  If I really could have done other than I did do -- and write 'really could not have done' instead of 'really could have done' in the earlier part of this sentence -- then not all acts are mechanistically determined and the results of Kant's First Critique are wrong.  How could the conclusions of both Critiques be true?   If mechanistic determinism, then no freedom; if freedom then no mechanistic determinism.  Tertium non datur!!  

I have read quite a bit of philosophy since those early days, but I must confess that I have not really gotten sufficient clarity on the freedom/determinism issue to make much progress.  Clearly, every event has a cause including each act that I do.  Yet if I am not really free to do other than what I did do, then I cannot be culpable for my actions.  With what propriety can I ascribe praise and blame to someone who cannot do other than what he does do?

Probably James' "Dilemma of Determinism" was most convincing to me.  I can believe in freedom of the will.  On questions that are momentous, unavoidable, and not ultimately empirically determinable, then I have a right to choose that belief which is most subjectively satisfying.  Either freedom of the will is true or it is not true.  If it is not true, then I am in the subjectively unsatisfying position of always regretting actions I do which, if determinism is true, I could not have not done.  My experience is one of regretting what is unchangeable, and even, if enlightened about determinism, regretting my regretting of what is unchangeable.  Why would one choose to believe that which makes a mockery out of one's very moral experience?

But my practical belief in libertarianism (the freedom to do other than what one did do) could not dispel my theoretical doubts. After all, it seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that everything in the universe is ultimately physical -- including us.  This means inter alter that explanation schemes for the realization of contra-causal action are difficult to frame. Assume that macro-event A causes macro-event B.  Given that physicalism is likely true -- that what there ultimately is in the universe are those entities over which the quantifiers of our fundamental theories of micro-physics quantify -- then each macro-event must have some realization at progressively lower levels of descriptions terminating in those most basic entities (or fields) over which micro-physics quantifies.

Even though 'A causes B' can perhaps not be given a reductive analysis in terms of a congeries of micro-events and entities constituting A and a congeries of micro-events and entities constituting B, it is nonetheless true that some set of entities and events realize A and some other set realize B.  Presumably, top-down causality does not hold, i.e., that actualizations at upper levels can causally influence the distribution of their realizers at the lower levels.  Accordingly, the laws effecting the distribution of lower level events and entities must be indigenous to those lower levels.  Thus, the distribution of these lower level events and entities will metaphysically determine the causal relations at the upper levels.  Simply put, macro-causality is realized by the physical micro-causal, and there is no room for the contra-causal agency of human beings.  While there is no type/type identity between macro-events and their realizers, there is token/token identity.  That is to say, every occasion of A need not be realized in the same way at the lower levels, but there must be some realization or other of A.   One might say that A and B are multiply realizable at the lower levels.

It is precisely these considerations that have made it difficult for me to get clear on any way to solve the problem of freedom and nature.  Freedom seems not to be part of nature, but profoundly part of what it is to be me.  Nature seems not to have any freedom, and indeed to give it freedom seems to make a mockery out of our science.  How could the lower level physical realizers of uncaused actions spontaneously appear?

All of this is but an extended introduction to Immanuel Kant's Third Critique.  In his 1790 Critique of Judgment -- actually it is Der Kritik der Urtielkraft, or "Critique of the Power of Judgment"-- Kant mounts a spirited defense of a position that animated earlier readers of the Kritik, but has not been much understood since.  In this Critique, Kant argues for the possibility of a rapprochement between Nature and Freedom, between the results of the First Critique and the results of the Second.  Famously, he argues for a different type of judgment than the determinative judgments of the first two Critiques.

While it is the imagination and understanding which work to form and experience the objects of the empirical world according to the laws of nature we ourselves promulgate, and while it is reason that functions to determine our moral experience according to the moral law that we autonomously legislate, there is a judgment tied to aesthetics and teleology that does not determine the particular on the basis of the universal, but which allows a universal to be thought on the basis of the particular.  In this reflective judgment, which Kant does not explicitly connect to aesthetics in the Critique of Judgment, there is granted a license to judge universally and subjectively the purposiveness of that which has no purpose.  In this judgment, one is ultimately allowed to think that there is a supersensible substratum connecting the sensibility of nature and the supersensibility of freedom, a noumenal reality that shows itself in teleological organization in nature, and in the doing, rescues nature from a position of total otherness (alienation?) from freedom.

Imagine John acting to save Mary from her drug addiction.  Presumably, John could not have acted so to save Mary, but did so act, and thus his act is freely done and praiseworthy because of it.  But where does John realize his free decision to do other than what he might have done and take Mary to the drug treatment center?

He seemingly must do this action wholly embodied in nature  -- his body is physical and his actions are physical events -- and thus the entire realization of his free decision so to act is subject to the determinism of nature.  So how could this free act be possible in a mechanical universe?  What are the transcendental conditions allowing for the realization of Freedom in Nature?

Kant's answer is that we are allowed to think that there is in nature purposive structure.  The heart exists to pump blood.  The pumping of the blood allows the heart to be conceived as cause.  The symmetries of nature allow a designer to be thought as cause.  Nature itself organizes itself, and in this organization points to a summum bonum as the limit of such organization, as the attractor towards which all things flow.  In the organization of nature can be found the manifestation of the supersensible, a manifestation that makes possible the realization of freedom precisely in the determinism of nature.  Kant is hoping to locate a unity to reason grounding both its theoretical and practical operations, a unity that does not, however, fall prey to the antinomies of Pure Reason, a unity that escapes the charge of the bare posit of another pulling of a metaphysical rabbit out of the hat.

An evaluation of the degree to which Kant is successful must await, however, a precise statement of the argument for the unity of reason found in the Critique of Judgment.  It is to this that I hope soon to return.