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.  

Rethinking Philosophy and Theology with Deleuze: An Introduction

Every so often a book is published that demands serious and sustained engagement. Adkins and Hinlicky's 2013 Rehinking Philosopher and Theology with Deleuze raises a number of important issues that I shall address in a series of posts.  

A major question of the book concerns the relationship between the exploration of being as such versus the investigation of the highest being.  Philosophy has traditionally dealt with the first and theology with the second. But what is the relationship between these two explorations?  The tradition has assumed a discontinuity between philosophy's reasoned exploration of being as such, and theology's religious response to that which reveals itself as highest.  However, must this be the case?  What ought this relationship be, given the contemporary intellectual and cultural context in which we find ourselves?

Adkins and Hinlicky ask us to reconsider regnant discontinuity assumptions about theology and Philosophy. Instead of the disciplines being concerned with different types of things, might one better understand them as poles on a continuum?  Adkins and Hinlicky suggest that we might better regard them as assemblages, as constructions out of heterogeneous components.  Were we to regard them so, might we make progress on a set of vexing questions that appear to us now as insolvable?  

But what is an assemblage?  The authors write: "An assemblage is a singular and temporary coagulation of heterogeneous forces that achieves consistency"(2).  Importantly, 'consistency' here does mean either unity or identity. An assemblage is assembled out of disparate components, and that these disparate components are assembled out of disparate components. It was Deleuze and Guattari who introduced the metaphysics of assemblage in their books, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy?.   

The properties of assemblages are dependent on the properties of their component parts as they sustain relations with each other.  Assemblages generate limits -- one towards dissolution and the other towards constriction. The first limit functions as the boundary of the assemblage beyond which the assemblage transitions into another.  Deleuze and Guattari use terms like 'immanence', 'deterritorialization', 'molecular', 'smooth space', and 'chaos' in naming the dissolution limit.  Alternately, 'transcendence', 'territorialization', 'molar', 'striated space', and 'opinion' apply to the constriction limit.   

In the history of philosophy, say Delueze and Guittari, the notion of a thing gets confused with the assemblage reaching its limit of constriction. When one asks what something is, one is treating the assemblage as a thing. The very question lifts that which looks stable and eternal out of the context of its ever-changing existence.  

However, this question of the what is, for Deleuze and Guattari, clearly secondary to the question of "which one?"  This latter question concerns singular, concrete sets of capabilities within the process of being, the behavior of concrete assemblages (3).  

The book aims to explore theology as an assemblage, particularly in its relationship to the assemblages of both religion and philosophy. Unfortunately, according to Adkins and Hinlicky, "assemblages that have been created have impoverished rather than enriched our lives" (3). But why have the assemblages of philosophy, religion and theology impoverished our lives? 

Our authors tell us that the problem has been that we continually opt for discontinuity over continuity.  It is Kant who bequeathed to modernity the current form of the discontinuity thesis. It was he who sharply distinguished concepts from intuitions (percepts) and the supersensible from the sensible. It was he who pointed out and corrected Leibniz's confusion that "perception is just confused conception." 

Adkins and Hinlicky discuss the ontological dualisms to which Kant and much of western philosophy is committed. Such dualisms exist alongside the  basic grammatical distinction between subject and verb.  Accordingly, we traditionally have distinguished being and doing, cause and effect, and the conditioned and the conditions. These dualistic differences are difference in kinds, not degrees. Moreover, these kind differences presuppose hylomorphism's form/content schema and the analogy of being. 

Adkins and Hinlicky muse about what philosophy and theology might look like if we were to consider lightning as inseparable from its flash, being from inseparable from doing, and the doer inseparable from the deed (5).  Maybe hylomorphism could be replaced by hylozoism, by the notion of the self-organization of matter.  Accordingly, we might replace the analogy of being with the univocity of being. 

The authors are bold, for prima facie it seems that God/universe presents an ontological dualism if ever there were one. Traditionally, God has so far exceeded the perfection of His creation that one might speak of God only analogously. While the infinite God is literally not good in the way that finite being Mother Threasa is good, nonetheless God is more like Mother Threasa than He is like Joseph Stalin. God is that which none greater can be thought; God is the one activity of being in and throughout all activities of being. Clearly, the tradition has tended to blend the onto with the theo, in forming and committing itself to onto-the-logy.  But must Christian theology be committed to a rejection of ontological continuity between God and His creation?   

Thinking beyond discontinuities in theology means to think beyond immanence and transcendence. Every assemblage is a continuum from which we might abstract two poles. Philosophy tends toward the immanent and religion towards the transcendent. Now we reach the important point: transcendence need not entail a transcendent entity. All that is required for transcendence is "the organization of a field by something that is discontinuous with the field" (5).  Because Kant's transcendental categories are discontinuous with the manifold of sensation, they are discontinuous with that manifold.  But must this transcendence entail a difference in ontological kind? 

Christian theology, we are told, differs from both religion and philosophy because it attempts to think immanence and transcendence within a single assemblage. Accordingly, theology is a "fragile, paradoxical assemblage," and can easily become bad religion or bad philosophy (6).  Christian theology must eschew simile in favor of metaphor, apophatic theology in favor of kataphatic theology, and negative dialectic in favor of positive dialectic. Were we to assume a basic continuity between God and other beings, we might be able to conceive God as a "fully giving self-relation . . .  commonly referred to as the Trinity" (7). 

The continuity thesis shall require a rich cartography because maps must be continually drawn and redrawn since assemblages are always in the process of becoming. Rethinking Philosophy and Theology with Deleuze explores how theology, philosophy and religion might map on the assumption of the continuity thesis.  

Kant has been most influential in the drawing of boundaries over the last 250 years. These boundaries have had real staying power.  Much of the tradition has simply followed Kant's lead in establishing boundaries for what things (and their disciplines) are and what they are not. Thus it is that phenomenology, the new ontology, existentialism and even deconstruction remain wedded to the drawing of boundaries on the assumption of discontinuity. Adkins and Hinlicky ask what the rejection of discontinuity might mean to the refiguring of philosophy, theology and religion generally. 

Clearly, Adkins and Hinlicky are asking an interesting question, and this is why I shall spend some time unpacking their text.  Ultimately, the success of their argument rests not in the broad strokes in which it can be stated, but in the answers they can provide to the many related mostly philosophical questions that arise on the assumption of these broad strokes.  

In reading the Adkins and Hinlicky's text, I was reminded of the process metaphysics that process theology appropriated from Whitehead's Process and Reality.  Prima facie for Whitehead and followers, neither the antecedent and consequent natures of God nor God and the universe are ontologically discontinuous from each other.  Accordingly, in discussing later chapters of the book I shall be interested in whether dialogue with the promise and perils of process thought is at all fruitful in understanding the authors own move from hylomorphism to hylozoism. My questions throughout are explorations shall be these: Is is true that transcendence need not entail a transcendent entity, and is Christian theology conceptually possible without a transcendent entity?  

Transcendental Reflection and the Divine Other

I

Transcendental reflection investigates those conditions necessary for there to be the kind of experience that we have. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) famously inquired into the "transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience as such," finding that pure priori forms of sensibility and pure a priori concepts of the understanding are both necessary to deliver the world as it is: one filled with objects having properties causally related to one another. Without these, the universality and necessity of Newtonian physics could not obtain.  

Kant inaugurated a type of thinking that has in many respects dominated theology for the last couple of hundred years.  Kant argued that in order to have a unity to experience there must be a transcendental unity of apperception, a unifying activity that is itself possible to reflect upon. In writing the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant was thinking about his own thinking, about the way that thinking grants unity to experience.  His thinking about thinking was neither an empirical thinking, a thinking of mathematics or geometry, nor a thinking about the ultimate nature of things as Leibniz and Wolff would have thought.  It was a reflective thinking that offered insight into how the unity of experience is possible, a thinking that sought the truth of this unity of experience.  It was not a metaphysical thinking of the transcendent, but a transcendental thinking that brought into the light of day those structures employed but not noticed, a thinking that sought a hermeneutical retrieval of that which is closest to us but remains unnoticed. 

Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were convinced of the profundity of Kant's project which reflected upon, and ultimately coaxed into the open, those transcendental structures making experience possible. A transcendental unity of apperception did not commit one to Descartes' "thinking substance'; such a unity of thinking that did not entail old school metaphysics. Fichte and followers followed Kant's lead after pointing out that the good philosopher could not sustain his famous distinction between things as they are in themselves and things as they appear for us. 

If thinking is that which unites our experience, then why must such thinking be turned back by a putative thing-in-itself? This too could be thought, and thinking this actually dissolves problematic dualisms. Of course, there is something one bumps up against in experience (Anstoss), but such a bumping does not entail that that what is bumped is of a wholly disparate ontological lineage.  Perhaps nature which, as Kant pointed out, is already the result of the synthesizing activity of the transcendental unity of apperception, is not a joint product of something out there and our synthesis.  Perhaps it simply is the result of our synthesis, a synthesis that does not have to hook to the disparate, but can simply connect to itself in appropriate ways.  And so it is that the I posits the very world with which it must deal, the world that it can know, the world that serves as the backdrop to the moral life and all the loftiest of the human heart.  

Transcendental reflection is born in the security of the transcendental unity of apperception, a security that finally cannot admit the Other, for to admit that is to destroy the very grounds upon which transcendental reflection is based.  To posit the Other is to return to the problematic between things as they appear and things in themselves; it is to bark up the Kantian tree and return to an aporia once thought solved and vanquished.  Thinkers in the Kantian tradition knew that this could not be progress.  After the Kantian critique of old-style metaphysics, the security of the transcendental provided a felicitous place for the narrative of God and His incursion into history to took place.  

II

At the risk of oversimplification, I claim that in the days prior to Kant, the days running from the Old Testament prophets through Plato and Aristotle to the steppes of the Enlightenment, the alterity or otherness of God was simply taken for granted by the Church and society generally. Although one could not know the nature of God, the regnant assumption was that God did have a nature that was not dependent upon human awareness, perception, conception or language.  God's being did not depend upon human being, particularly not upon human thinking.  

The story of how Neoplatonic thought forms gradually gave way to Aristotelian categories is important to tell, however, for our present purposes, I will just remark that both types of thinking generally assumed that the Being of God is externally related to human being.  Whether God is regarded as being itself or as the highest being, the tradition acknowledged that God is causally related to the universe.  God's creation of the universe is a causing of the universe to be. Without God's act of creation, the universe would not have being.  Divine power is needed to bring being out of non-being.  Accordingly, the theological tradition was generally committed to the reality of God apart from human being -- the thesis of theological realism -- and the possibility of causal connections between God and the universe -- the thesis of theophysical causation.  

At the dawn of the Reformation, there were a number of differing theological schools that read Augustine, Plato and especially Aristotle in different ways, ways that reflected differing philosophical positions on the ontology of universals and the relationship of these universals to particulars.  While it is an oversimplification to say that Aristotle had become the philosopher of the Christian tradition, many theological traditions assumed with him that there were basic things in the world (substances) and that these substances had properties, some of which were necessary for the substance itself, and some which were accidental to the substance, that is, some of which could either be had by the substance or not possessed by it  without changing the being of the substance. God's creation was a creation of substances with properties.  These substances were the effects of God's creativity activity.  Adam and Eve were individual substances bearing the kind-identifying properties of being both rational and animal. The contour of Adam and Eve's particularity was due to the contingent properties each possessed.  

All of this is important for Christology. That God is in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself meant that the particular entity Christ had both divine and human properties and that Christ had causal power.  The miracle stories suggest all of this, of course.  The being (or substance) Jesus caused it to be the case that 5,000 men (plus women and children) were fed with two fish and five loaves of bread. This being caused it to be true that the man Lazereth was no longer dead.  

Christ was the God-man, He is the second person of the Trinity that had assumed human flesh.  The Second Person eternally existed; there was never a time when Christ was not.  This means inter alia that Christ is simply other than any human who might think, love or trust in Him.  Christ is not a category of human thinking, but a name for a being that exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception or language.  To say that Christ is externally related to anybody ether accepting or rejecting him is to assume that Christ is other that anybody either accepting or rejecting Him.  

When it came time for Enlightenment rationalists to do theology, it was very natural to do it in a metaphysical key. God who is other than worldly being or human thinking must ultimately be seen as the sine qua non of the created order. The principle of sufficient reason claiming that for anything that is there must be some reason why it is, when applied to the universe seemed to point univocally to God.  

One might claim that the time before Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was a "pre-critical" time where the primary objects of religious thought and experience were not yet dissolved into the fog of rational doubt.  Reason, properly applied in discovering many truths fully consonant with the Bible, attested to the same reality as the Holy Scriptures themselves.  

While Kant himself seemed to leave room for there to be a God that is other than human thinking, this God could not be known, and accordingly, the enterprise of rational theology had to be profoundly rethought. The idealist tradition following Kant wished to think God within the security of transcendental subjectivity. Reason had found a place for God that could protect God from the contingencies of the other.  When one thinks about it, the post-Kantian theological tradition can be read in part as an attempt to rescue theology from Lessing's "broad ugly ditch."  Clearly, this theological tradition could insulate the "necessary truths of reason" from the "accidental truths of history."  

III

Martin Heidegger knew the tradition well, understood Kant, and had read Martin Luther.  In the Freiburg lectures from 1919-23, Heidegger shows himself increasingly dissatisfied with a thinking in theology that leaves out the life of the one thinking.  Heidegger's early attraction to Martin Luther (and fueled by Kierkegaard) was his attempt to find a way out from the security of the transcendental project.  For Luther, death was part of the very life of the theologian, an experienced life.  Luther famously uttered "experiential macht die Theologum".  There is nothing secure about finitude, about the life of the believer beset with "sin, death and the power of the devil."  The reality of all three is part of the experience out of which and in which theology is done.  Theological thinking must always be tied to the Otherness of God and the divine project of the salvation of the sinner.  It is a bold thinking of infinite things done by flesh-and-blood finite human beings whose thinking always happens under the Cross.  

Human thinking can never be wholly secure, because the otherness of sin, death and devil is always already besetting it. Such thinking is ecstatic, it is a thinking that is "outside oneself" because it is a thinking in the light of the Cross, a thinking that is a trusting in a Savior that is not a projection of one's own being, not an aspect of the nobility of human being with its cultivated intellectual and moral virtues, not a thinking that is grounded in reason.  Luther, who lived 250 years prior to the heyday of transcendental reflection, already knew that such reflection, if possible, could not end in human salvation.  To be saved is to be saved by that which is other than oneself.  Salvation happens in a world of flesh-and-blood believers dying and sinning.  Thirty-year old Martin Heidegger understood that if theology is to be a serious discourse, this discourse must not hide what is basic to the theologian: The theologian in her now is always already running ahead of herself in encountering that possibility of their being no more possibilities.  The theologian in her now is always already living death, sin and the power of the devil.  This triumvirate does not allow for calm, calculating thinking on the wonders of the grace-filled life.  Life is filled with death.  Our lives, like Christ's life, are lived in the shadow of our crucifixion.  We are now the not that we shall once be when we are no longer being the one for whom the not of the future is no longer.  

Heidegger wanted to bring reflection upon ultimate things back to the phenomenological-ontological-existential ground from which all metaphysical reflection arises. He wanted to call us back from the forgetfulness of this ground, a forgetfulness of being which gives rise both to our absorption in the world and our flights into metaphysical abstraction.  Heidegger's reading of Luther buttressed his conviction that it was time for philosophy to rediscover again the one for whom philosophy means, the one who in its being, has be-ing at issue for it.  With Heidegger, the spector of the Other comes into sight.  We are in our be-ing, beings for whom and by whom the question of being and meaning arise.  This questioning of be-ing by that being who cares about be-ing, is a questioning that opens to the Other of being, a questioning done over the pit of non-being, a questioning that itself is the conduit of the presencing of the absence of being.  Death, after all, cannot be taken up into the life of being; it is the boundary of being that establishes the conditions of being itself.  

IV

But the early Heidegger did not get to the Other.  His project remained curiously within the province of transcendental thinking and subjectivity.  Laying out (interpreting) the existential-phenomenological-ontological roots of our reflection upon being is at some level a continuation of transcendental subjectivity. In our thinking, we think Dasein which is open to its Other, but we can only think this alterity as part of the transcendental existential-ontological conditions for the possibility of ontic engagement with an Other, an Other that may for Dasein have profound existentiell significance.  No longer does the transcendental thinker lay out the unity of the categories of human thinking by which the world is known, now this thinker is engaged in highlighting the unity of the existential structures themselves by which and through which the unity of care is possible, a caring that grounds any thinking in the first place.  

The problem is clearly seen in Heidegger's treatment of other Daseins.  They are Mitsein for Dasein who can have Fuersorge for them, but they themselves in their otherness from Dasein cannot be be in themselves other.  The early Heidegger is simply unable to bring the world into focus.  He can and does get to the world from a certain position in the world, but cannot get to the world itself.  Being cannot ultimately be refracted by considering profoundly being as it is da (there).  What gets thought when considering Da-sein is Dasein, not Sein.  Ironically, Heidegger finds himself in the position of Leibniz.  One has a take on the world within any monad, but monads are windowless, and the world itself can only be reconstructed as describable above the fray of the monadic descriptions themselves.  To get to that world, one needs theological commitments not presenting themselves within the metaphysics of the monad.  

So wither comes the Other?  Can it be brought into focus beyond the security of the transcendental project?  Did Levinas accomplish its encounter with the face? Can phenomenological encounter ground the Other?  Can it give a basis for a radical theological of the Cross where one finds oneself living without metaphysical and ontological nets, as it were?  Can alterity be thought of ontically in the way of those of the Reformation, as an otherness of being toward being?  Must we finally admit that it can only be shown and never said, but that in its showing that we discern the real ontological position of human beings eviscerated by sin, death and the power of the devil as they live their lives in the shadows of the hidden divine.  The Theology of the Cross is about showing, but not about a metaphysics of presence.  Showing here cannot be said without the said Showing turning into such a presence. Wittgenstein knew that showing happens in words, but not in truth-claims. To say what can only be shown is to turn preaching into a dogmatics that must always miss the glimpse of Divine alterity.  

Bringing this Other into the open will demand an overturning of the very identity that has grounded the security of our theology of glory project of transcendental reflection.  At the end of the day, human beings cannot save themselves.  Salvation demands an overturning of the ontological of identity, an identity that has closed the clearing of the divine other, a clearing that finds in God's traces its own footsteps. At stake is the fundamental question: Can otherness show itself as what it is, or must if always show itself as what it is for us.  At stake is the fundamental question of the Garden: Did God really say?  

Reflecting Judgments and another Kind of Metaphysics

I. Kantian Background

It is well known that Kant rejected traditional metaphysics, claiming that such metaphysics attempts to know that which "lies beyond the bounds of possible experience." Kant held that metaphysics' grand cognitive failure is due ultimately to the particular constitution of the human understanding.  

We are constituted epistemically by possessing two quite different elements, one spontaneous and one receptive. We have the spontaneous ability to work the world up conceptually. Such conceptual thinking constitutes the form by which anything is known.  When we think we are active in our thinking; we attempt to know by grasping and shaping that which we know.  

But knowing the world does not consist merely in an active, spontaneous, formal grasping of what is known.  There is something, after all, that must be present to be grasped and shaped.  Kant argues persuasively that this content to be shaped is received, i.e, it is an intuition, something given by outer sense, something that is not itself the result of our grasping and shaping. Of course, the matter is a bit more difficult than this. That which is given by outer sense is not the Ding an sich, the thing-in-itself, but is rather an appearance of that thing.  

I believe that the best way to interpret Kant here is by claiming that it is the same thing that is in itself and that appears to us. What appears is not what the thing is in itself, but rather what the thing in itself is for our intuitional capabilities.`The thing in itself as given to us is always patio-temporally formed by the pure forms of sensibility, that is the pure intuitions of space and time.  While we actively organize that which is by the forms of space and time, the entire spatio-temporal formed content is nonetheless received as an appearance of the supersensible thing-in-itself. 

When we are knowing the empirical world rightly, the pure concepts of the understanding are spontaneously applied to the manifold of intuitions, and we have from this the reality of empirical experience as such. Such experience is already given as knowledge with quantity, quality, relation, and modality built into it, as it were.  Most importantly, our empirical experience is always one where there are things that can change while remaining themselves (substances), and things that change because other things have changed (causality). Knowledge of the natural world is thus always mechanistic.  Because we organize the world according to the universal law of causality -- for every event x, there must be some y such that y causes x -- all natural events have some causal explanation such that there are necessary and sufficient conditions why those events happened.  

Our cognition of the natural world is discursive. Intuitions are received and actively organized by concepts. An object is thus that by concept of which the manifold of intuition is united.  Without intuitions, our concepts would be empty, and without concepts, our intuitions would be blind.  When we know anything we begin with the concept (a universal) and subsume intuitions (the particulars) underneath it.  While space "falls within" space and time "falls within time:, particulars "fall under" concepts.  Our judgments of the world are determinative, that is, when we judge something to be the case, we must actively engage in a synthesis, bringing particular percepts under universal concepts according to rules.  These rules actively constitute objects.  

We hear a sound, see a shape, feel a presence, and are confronted with an odor.  The sound, shape, tactile sensation, and odor are synthesized immediately into an experience of a dog.  The dog exists by perduring through time, taking on other qualities without relinquishing its individuality, its being that particular dog, a dog called 'Spot'.  We don't simply know the dog as a particular immediately, it is rather mediately given through application of concept to percept. Since we have no immediate access to the thing-in-itself, we cannot immediately intuit individuals. Such individuality is the result of synthesis and constitution.  

This is very bad news for traditional metaphysics. Such metaphysics had attempted to unhinge the conceptual apparatus of the understanding from its connectedness to intuitions, and allow it to operate purely formally, hoping, as it were, that by formal reflection using the law of non-contradiction, one might be able to fill in the content of the supersensible world.  Kant devotes half of the Critique of Pure Reason to showing that metaphysics falls prey to a transcendental illusion or subreption when it is tempted to think that what is necessary for thinking also displays the contour of reality itself. The problem is that the activity and spontaneity of the formal conceptual is no longer being applied to the passivity and receptivity of intuitional content.  

So it is that metaphysics, once the queen of the sciences, has fallen on hard times. Indeed, Kant believes that when the form of thinking is disconnected from the content to be thought, metaphysics ends in paralogisms and antinomies. Reason now unfettered from intuition can both prove that there is a first cause of the world and not a first cause of the world; it can prove that there is contra-causal freedom and there is no such freedom. Reason, in searching for the unconditioned, still dreams that it can make use of determinative judgment, that it can find in its grasping and shaping that which is ultimately the case.  

But it is a fool's mission. Traditional metaphysics cannot know what is ultimately the case because the very condition for knowledge is that the manifold of intuition must be synthesized according to the rules implicit in the pure and empirical concepts of the understanding. Since this epistemic condition is not met by traditional metaphysics, metaphysics, no matter how sophisticated, can merely spin its castles in the sky.  It cannot know. 

Kant believed, however, that this state of affairs is not the end of the discussion, but merely the beginning. The self-legislation of the understanding which produces nature is at most only half of what is relevant to human beings. Human beings are, unfortunately, naturally metaphysical. We are concerned always with three focal notions: God, freedom and immortality.  If self-legislated nature was all there is, then there could be no God, freedom or immortality. In fact, the entire life of Decartes' res cogitans ("thinking thing") would simply be cut off, cast off, and ignored, as if the experience of the res cogitans were merely an illusion or mistake.  We would be a natural object among natural objects, and like other natural objects caused to be. We would be determined in the contour of our being as other natural objects are determined in the contour of their being. The natural metaphysical inclinations of humanity would need thus to be regarded as the leftovers of human childhood; they are an infantile wish. While we might yet long for God, freedom, and immortality, the world would not be the kind of place that could deliver these things. 

But, of course, the story cannot be that simple.  Kant, after all, is engaged in transcendental reflection, that is, he is looking for the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience as such, and such a looking seems quite disconsonant with there being no res cogitans at all.  

Had not Kant determined that a transcendental unity of apperception was needed to have a stable and consistent synthesizing of the manifold of sensation?  While this transcendental unity cannot be known to be a metaphysical res cogitans, that is, a metaphysical substantial transcendental ego, it is also not the kind of thing that is the result of the application of concepts to spatio-temporal particulars. The existence of the transcendental unity of apperception, and the possibility of transcendental reflection in general seems to cry out for a more comprehensive view of things. After all, if we are the authors of nature through application of the categories onto things, if empirical reality is the result of our self-legislation, then how can we simply halt our curiosity and say that nature is all there is? If it is we who make nature what it is, how can we ignore ourselves, the makers of nature? 

Thus, it is incumbent on Kant to search further to clarify and understand transcendentally what this transcendental subject is. Clearly, this subject is not the empirical subject of psychology, subject, as it were, to all of the psychological laws of conditioning. While psychology might find the psychological self to be determined, this determinism does not properly extend to the transcendental subject that can inquire into the conditions of the very possibility of the empirical psychological self being determined. When one reflects upon the project of transcendental reflection seriously, one realizes that the entire project presupposes something like judgment as it was conceived by Descartes. That great 17th century philosopher thought it a necessary condition to judge rightly or wrongly that one were free to judge. One must accumulate evidence as to why x might be the case or y might hold and on the basis of that evidence judge that x exists or y does. But how is that activity possible without freedom?  

Kant is concerned with the giving of evidence in his transcendental reflections. Such evidence-giving is what the transcendental deductions are all about. To provide a deduction in Prussian court of law is to give a valid  argument and evidence of title. Kant is interested in providing transcendental deductions that show that understanding is entitled to its claims that it does know the empirical world. As Newton thought, but Hume denied, we can have both universal and necessary knowledge of the empirical order. But this giving of transcendental evidence cannot be the result of the mechanism of nature, because the mechanism of nature only holds on the ground of proper application of transcendental reflection, a reflection that shows that human beings are entitled to claim that the can know nature objectively, in terms of both universalizability and necessity. 

But what else do we know about this transcendental subject? Is it merely a knower of the empirical order, or is it engaged in other matters? For Kant, the answer is quite obvious. Human being do not make merely empirical judgments about nature, but the make moral judgments about what ought to be done, and aesthetic judgments about what is beautiful. They make both moral judgments and judgments of taste. 

As it turns out, reason is not completely sidelined by its failure to use determining judgments in carving the beast of ultimate reality at its joints. Reason has other work to do rather than merely to know.  It must do as well. But what ought it to do? No amount of empirical knowledge of nature's is can ever help us determine what we ought to do. One cannot derive an ought from and is, after all. If the ought is to be understood, it won't be understood along the lines of nature, where concepts must synthesize the manifold of sensation into an experience of the world in which the universal law of causality holds. If we are to understand anything about the ought, we need to do it with reason, for such reason need not be mechanical in the way of the understanding. This is the reason that heeds reason!  But Kant had just argued that pure reason is not suited to mime the contour of the supersensible world. So what remains? 

Kant believes we do, in fact, employ reason practically rather than purely in dealing with moral questions. Given that we desire to do x, ought it be the case that we do, in fact, do x? In order to know what to do, we must consult moral law. Acting morally is acting due to this moral law. This acting presupposes freedom which is the condition for the possibility that consulting the moral law can determine the will. This determination of the will constitutes a desire to do x rather than y. Practical reason determines action by consulting the moral law on the basis of freedom. It thus constitutes a noumenal access to the supersensible, an access that allows for the very determination of the supersensible.  

Through the transcendental unity of apperception, the autonomous transcendental subject legislates law into and onto the empirical order. While the supersensible ground of this legislation, the realm of the thing-in-itself, remains indeterminate with respect to this legislation, with respect to the moral sphere, the supersensible becomes determinate. The autonomous transcendental subject through practical reason also self-legislates, this time it legislates the moral law in accordance with the categorical imperative, and accordingly acts due to that moral law alone. This autonomous subject is free to do x or y because such freedom is presupposed by the experience of ought itself.  

So at the end of the Critique of Practical Reason, we find Kant in a situation not wholly unlike that of Descartes. Descartes had left us with two disparate domains: one a realm of natural objects governed by mechanical natural law (the res extend), and the other a domain of the thinking subject free to think or do other than what one had thunk or done. This substance dualism of the mechanical deterministic alongside the purposeful and free could not, however, be conceived in such a way as to allow linkage between the two.  Descartes' dualistic causal interactionism seemingly depends upon a connection between the disparate, a connection that, on the grounds of dualism itself, would either need to be a corporeal or a non-corporeal connection. But if either of these, then would there not need to be another connection connecting these?  

Kant had two different self-legislations, one issuing in a domain of determinism and the other one of freedom. His linking of the two has more options than Descartes because while the latter was thinking that he had mined reality, Kant knew that the empirical world is just one of appearance. In his Third Antinomy in the First Critique Kant solves the problem of freedom and determinism simply by pointing that we are transcendentally free even though we are phenomenally determined. While the concept of the supersensible underlying nature is wholly indeterminate, we can nonetheless understand that the supersensible underlying our moral order is determinate in its freedom and it acts out of duty to the moral law.  

But there is a big problem for Kant. How is it possible that a human being that is corporeal and subject to determinism as a natural object, is nonetheless free to have done other than it might have done by choosing to do act x rather than act y because doing act x is acting due to the moral law? How is the kingdom of ends possible, the corporeally-instantiated association of moral agents having dignity on the basis of their freedom. Does this not seem like the ghost of Descartes has returned? The linkage between the autonomous moral agent and the natural product instantiating it must be an identity, but that leaves open the question of the properties that agent has.  Is she really free to do other than what she did do, or is she determined after all?  Saying that determination is merely an appearance and she really is free, means that much of nature will be erroneously said to be determined when it is not. After all, there are nearly 8 billion agents comprising the kingdom of ends, and that number is rising quickly. How can all of these have freedom, but nature in general not? So Kant believes he needs to provide some unity between the results of the two Critiques. 

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant is concerned with judgments of the agreeable, judgments of taste, judgments of the good, judgments of the sublime and teleological judgments. He clarifies considerably his notion of judgment in this critique, distinguishing between determining judgments (bestimmende Urteile) and reflecting judgments (rerflectierende Urteile).  The first cover the type of constitutive judgments Kant had assumed in both Critiques. In a determining judgment, the universal subsumes the particular under it.  In so doing, nature can be thought as being comprised of substantial natural objects which are instances of kinds and related to each other causally. Through such judgments we can think of a world of parts determining one another such as to constitute a whole. 

But a reflecting judgment is not constitutive.  It is rather like being regulative in the way that Kant spoke about this in the Transcendental Dialectic in the Critique of Pure Reason.  Reason goes astray when it thinks its judgments have content.  Formally they move from the conditioned to the unconditioned ground of the conditioned, but they cannot establish causality, because the causal connection is a denizen of the empirical order. They can regulate how we think, but cannot fill in the content of what is to be thought. For that we need intuition. A reflecting judgment does not constitute by bringing particulars under universal, but regulates by thinking universals on the basis of given particulars. 

Reflecting judgments start with the given particular, and are free to discover universals that might apply to those particulars. In aesthetic judgments, beauty is ascribed on the basis of the presentation of particulars.  While Kant is sure to claim that beauty is not a property of the thing, it is nonetheless universally and necessarily ascribed on the basis of particular presentations that involve a proper stimulation of the imagination in its interconnectedness with the understanding, an interconnectedness producing a feeling of pleasure. Beautiful objects are thus experienced as purposive although they have no purpose. The purposiveness of the thing is merely formal, depending as it does on the particular interplay of the imagination and understanding, one in which the understanding is stimulated as thinking the parts of the presentation as a function of the whole. It is as if the beautiful object had a final cause determining its parts in accordance with its end. 

What is particularly interesting about reflecting judgments is how they can be used teleologically, and how they might be applied in a more thoroughgoing way. Used teleologically, the judgments allow us to grasp in a more comprehensive form certain empirical processes and laws, particularly of a biological nature.  

It does seem, after all, as if there are processes whose best explanation makes use of functional or purposeful explanations. What is the best way to explain the bird's behavior under the gutter on the house? The bird can be seen flying to and fro with small pieces of straw or little twigs or blades of grass in its beak. To offer an explanation of this flying and selecting of appropriate twigs with which to fly without mentioning that the bird is building a nest is very difficult. Imagine giving an explanation of this behavior by appealing only to mircophysical particles and the relevant laws of nature governing them.  

Kant lived at a time where there was no scientific explanation for how life, no matter how primitive, could arise from inanimate, material conditions. There simply was no way to account for the behavior of purposive beings by appealing to mechanistic laws. I think, however, that while trying to understand nature in Kant's time without appealing to teleological explanations would have been impossible, it is still quite difficult for us today.  

Imagine the bird in the process of building a nest. Let us call the bird and its beak, twigs and flying a supervening level of description with its appropriate ontology. There are birds, and nests, and twigs, etc.  Let us in faithfulness to reductionism claim that there is an ultimate subvenient base such that two molecule-by-molecule replicas at the subvenient level would result in the same state of affairs at the supervening level of the bird. Will will not be type reductionists here but only token reductionists or more fashionably, non-reductive physicalists. We shall claim that for each and every event at the supervenient level there is some state of affairs at the subvenient level such that we can draw a function from the subvenient to the supervenient.  

So does the subvenient level explain the supervening level?  Clearly, the answer is "No, it does not." The subvenient level metaphysically realizes the supervenient level but does not explain it -- at least not yet. So what is the explanation for the bird flying the twigs to a spot under my gutter? One might say now that the best explanation is simply that the bird is behaving as it does because it wants to bring about the building of its nest. But is such an explanation in terms of purpose the same as that of Kant? 

Kant would probably say that there is some slight of hand here. One would need to specify the explanation of why the higher level would supervene upon the lower.  Clearly, it is the case that the bird exerts purposive behavior and that behavior is realized physically, and that the bird thus makes use of fundamental particles and laws in its behaving. But one cannot simply leave it at that, assert an asymmetrical dependency relation and claim that the subvenient ultimately determines the supervenient. That is to smuggle what Kant would call the mechanistic explanation in the back door without explaining how it might actually be that apparent purpose arises from an underlying mechanism.  

My point here is that it is really quite unclear that if Kant were here he would change his mind on the need for real teleological explanations in nature. He might say that his position on teleological explanation was that he used such explanations when mechanistic ones were inadequate. Recalling #77 and #78 in the Critique of Judgment he might say, "I can imagine a being other than I or you who might have different cognitive equipment and might thus be able to understand particulars immediately, not as worked up through concepts. Such a being could perhaps see that there is some deeper mechanism that we will never be able to grasp because of the constitution of our epistemic equipment. Although this fact should be faced squarely, we should in our cognitive lives simply use teleological explanations in nature and afford them truth-conditions and ontological status, for we do not have such intellectual intuition." 

While Kant knows that reflecting teleological judgments likely give the best explanation for natural processes as they were understood in his day, it seems that he wants more out of reflecting judgment. He is searching in his reflecting judgments for both simplicity and unity. He discusses his architectonic task in the Critique of Pure Reason and other places. He is clearly interested in a vision of the world that might fit our natural metaphysical aspirations, a world where God, immortality and freedom are present; a world which is unified and coherent.  He wants to use reflecting judgment to unify his critical philosophy. Kant knows that this unification will not come from the bottom-up as the more basic stuff in the universe determine determine what is at the top.  Instead this must be top-down vision of the world, one where the synthetic universal at the level of the Idea can take us what is disparate and disunited and place it into a unity.

Kant has a story about how this might happen, but it is not deeply worked out. Below I provide the beginning of my own story. 

II. Another Kind of Metaphysics

I think Kant was on the right path in his treatment of reflecting judgment in the Critique of Judgment. Such judgments are a matter of taste and they are made on the basis of intellectual pleasure, that is, they concern beauty.  Kant knew that we had no way of knowing the ultimate metaphysical contour of reality, but he did not simply ignore the problem of the human inclination to do metaphysics.  After all, we are by our very nature interested in the questions of God, immortality and freedom. 

So let's think about doing another kind of metaphysics. Let's think of metaphysics in terms of looking about for some universal that we might be able to apply to given particulars. I am not thinking merely about the particulars of empirical objects or special science specific laws, but all of the facets of existence that are given to us, and which appear prima facie disparate.  We might think of this as a metaphysical theory, but we are not looking at either traditional explanation or prediction from our theory.  We look rather for something more akin to an artistic vision which might both apply to and be adequate to the most abstract features of concrete experience as such. These most abstract features would be the theory's particulars. Our goal is simply to think reality coherently and consistently.  

Let us call M a metaphysical vision, schema or understanding of things which is internally consistent, coherent and parsimonious, and applies to, and is adequately to all of our experience. M would be concerned with unity and would seek an understanding of the parts such that the the human inclination to search for metaphysical knowledge of God, freedom and immortality counts as much in the vision as successful mechanistic scientific explanation. Instead of playing down moral and aesthetic experience, M would seek regulatively to balance that experience alongside of empirical experience. Instead of denigrating certain subjects as not being truth-apt and thus noncognitive, M would assume that there is a way to unify the more truth-apt and the less truth-apt disciplines. The various disciplines in which humans engage, and the natural, social and cultural aspects of human life would all be the data of M.  

Clearly, there are many ways to cast M, but this is to be expected. If constructing M is done correctly, there are likely few disconfirming instances of it. If we are dealing with the most abstract features of concrete experience, and these features are exemplifications of M, then M is necessary. That is not to mean, that holding M as a vision of the world is necessary, only that M exists as a schema that has no disconfirmations given the present state of our empirical knowledge. 

What would be the use of having M? It would give us a way of seeing things that would involve the interplay of imagination and understanding as Kant thought, a way of seeing things that would produce in us a feeling of intellectual pleasure. The reflecting judgment that produces M realizes that there can be many Ms, both synchronically and diachronically. More than one object can be beautiful, after all.  However, M will make the demand of the aesthetic ought on all those capable of understanding.  

If we honestly engage in the reflecting project of providing M, we would, I think, find ourselves doing systematically what we are doing confusedly today. After all, something like a reflecting judgment is at work when we learn a little physics, a little literary theory, get a dash of German social theory, learn something from the news, reflect on the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, watch a crisis in Africa, think about global CO2 levels, and listen to jazz. We are always engaged in unifying our experience, even if the unification produces a view of thing that is chaotic, dissonant, and ultimately pessimistic, a view that downgrades the natural inclinations in us for the ideal and assigns the motives of moral decision-making to psychological egoism, or maybe to a privileged class or race consciousness. Not only individually, but as a culture, we are engaged in unifying experience by suppressing some features of it and highlighting others. What might be the result if we could step back and in an act of critical distantiation see the various features and elements of experience for what they are, and then seek to appropriate what we see in the building of an M that would grant us a view of things that would meet the standards of taste?   

Clearly, very few people would do this, and many would wonder why they should attempt it. But for some the intellectual satisfaction involved with conceiving a world that is consistent, coherent, simple, unified, and applicable and adequate to our deepest yearnings of the human heart might be worth the effort in casting it.  Why would one who could think M not ascribe beauty to it? If we find beauty in the fine arts and music, why could we not find it in a metaphysic that could deliver a view of things that made sense to us? 

This metaphysics is not theology, of course, but it would be concerned with some of that with which theology deals. It would take seriously the wonder of existence itself, and the tragedy of human dwelling in time. It would not abstract away from the questions of guilt, sin, and death, and our desire to find security in the great ideas of God, freedom and immortality. M cannot, of course, fail to deal with God, whose appearance in M ultimately motivates the very project of the casting of M. God appears in M formally as the ultimate theoretical entity for reflecting judgment. It is that which finally makes M coherent; it gives M the very possibility that the parts of M can mutually presuppose themselves.  God is thus at the depth of being; God is the sine qua non for the possibility that M can be cast in a way that cannot be disconfirmed by particular concrete experience.  

The God of M is not, of course, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Reflection cannot, I think, get us to the Trinity or to the Incarnation.  However, neither is the God of M the "God of the philosophers." M does not seek to cast about for a determining metaphysics for natural theology, but simply opens a path for a reflecting metaphysics of a theology of nature. Christian symbols can be exhibitions of M, I think, but other religious symbol systems are possible too.  

If Kant is correct about our cognitive powers, our powers of determining judgments, we can no more grasp the nature of the supersensible than Luther could find the hidden God. The supersensible is essentially mysterious, showing us any determinacy only in moral judgment.  However, reflecting judgment does perhaps make the supersensible determinable, and maybe that is enough for us yearning for beauty in our brief sojourn within the fields of time.