Model-Theoretic Considerations for Theological Semantics

I

I have for many years been convinced that the theological enterprise cannot survive in our age without affording to its language robust truth conditions.  Contemporary men and women presuppose what Jaegwon Kim once called Alexander's Dictum, that is, "to be is to have causal powers."  We don't live in the 19th century where ideas themselves are thought to have a kind of reality; we don' t live in a time in which the conceptuality of God can remain important for vast numbers of people. 

In our days, people are not generally searching to find some overarching concept or principle that grounds our rational thinking about life and existence, a notion that might somehow explain why human experience is given as it is, and accordingly, somehow ground the preciousness and value of that experience.  While Madonna once sung of a "material girl," we generally acknowledge that, even in our churches, the cultural primacy of the physical reigns.  The new atheism talks breathlessly of its discovery of a worldview without divine agency and causality -- as if such a view of things is in any way new.  There is an assumption of the causal closure of the physical among many unwashed in the complexities of the actual relations holding among experience, theory and truth, among those who simply believe that the theories of the natural and social sciences simply state the way things are.  

The idea is easy enough to grasp.  Consider this structure <{x | x is a natural event}, C>.  This is a structure consisting of the set of all natural events and a causal operator C relating members of this set of events to each other.  This structure can satisfy these two assertions:  1) For all x, there is some x (or other) that causes x, and 2) For all x, if x is caused, then it is caused by some x (or other).  What is precluded by this structure is that there is an x that can be caused by some event or agency that is outside the set {x | x is a natural event}, or that x causes some event or state of affairs outside the set {x | x is a natural event}.  Simply put, there are no non-physical events causing physical events, nor no physical events causing non-physical events.  

In addition to the causal closure of the physical assumed by many impressed with the results and progress of the natural and social sciences, it is also supposed, though not always as clearly, by the heralds of late nineteenth century radical criticism, that human beings are somehow alienated when they fail to come to terms with the physicality of their fate.  Feuerbach, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, all, in their own way, argued that the illusion of the traditional God connects with the fundamental alienation of men and women.  Marx, for instance, argued that human value and ideology is determined by underlying economic processes, and that the concept of God simply operates to block human beings from understanding the basic materiality of their existence.  The God concept sanctions prevailing ideology and functions to keep in place value ideologies grounded in the unequal distribution of economic materiality.  

Most people that continue to practice the Christian life believe that there is a God and that God is active in the world, i.e., they assume that "to be is to have causal powers" and that God has causal powers.  They speak about the divine design of the universe, and about the power of prayer, particularly prayers of petition.  They assume that there are things that have come about that would not have come about were there no God, and that there are events and processed that have not come about that would have come about were there no God.   

The structure they assume is perhaps this: <{x | x is an event}, g, C, D> where there is a set of natural events and there is God, and that there is a binary natural causal operator C linking natural events to other natural events, and a binary divine causal operator D, linking natural events to divine agency, e.g., 'Dgp' means God divinely produces event p, with p being a member of the set of all natural events.  

Metaphysics remains crucial in theology because claims about that beyond the physical are by nature metaphysical, and assuming God to be with causal powers means that something beyond the physical is bringing about something physical.  This is clearly a metaphysical claim. To afford to theological language robust truth conditions in an age that assumes that to be is to have causal powers means that theology must be self-consciously and boldly metaphysical.  There must be intellectual honesty here.  Either theological language is broadly expressive of the self, its experiences and existential orientations and possibilities, or it is a rule-governed customary discourse by and through which human communities function and operate in the world, or it is a type of discourse that non-subjectively donates possible ways of being, or perhaps it is realist in its motivations; it states what its utterers believe is the ultimate constitution of things.  

One needs to think through these issues very clearly.  What are either the truth or assertibility conditions of theological language if one eschews realism?  Are sentences in the language rightly assertible simply because my tribe (the theological tradition) has traditionally asserted them?  But clearly the assertibility condition cannot simply be 'x is properly assertible' if and only if x has been asserted by normative theologians of tradition T over time t.  Why? In order even to begin to evaluate that claim we must know the identity conditions of 'normative theologian' and 'tradition' and 'time'.   

Are the assertions of theology then either descriptions of the self -- its experience and existential orientations -- or are they expressions of the self?  Clearly, embracing the latter is to give up on truth,  for it entails that assertibility must be understood broadly in terms of a "boo hurrah" theory of theological language.  But the former alternative is not much better, for on its assumption the truth-makers of all theological language are not theological.  On this view, models satisfying a set of theological assertions are not theological models at all because the sets, functions and relations of the models deal with the human.  Since human dispositions, experiences, and orientations are operated upon by relations and functions, these functions and relations ultimately concern the human. The fact that such models can satisfy a class of theological statements, should give us pause about what it is we are doing when we provide theological models. 

But there is another alternative, for we might hold that theological language somehow operates to disclose truth, that language, the Word, in its wording grants world and our place within it must itself be given a theological model.  But it is to me unclear exactly how this model can be constructed coherently.  Models or structures concern domains with functions and relations drawn upon those domains. But what can be the domain of the creative Word?  Remember that revelation is not insight.  Insight concerns an intellectual grasp of that which is already present.  Revelation, on the other hand, is a daring grasp of what is not present, but which shows itself eschatologically.  There is so much that can be said here, but I cannot in this brief essay say it.  We must move to the central issue of the influence that model-theoretic arguments might have for one who in her theological semantics, is broadly speaking realist. 

II

While I could only sketch briefly in the last section my prima facie reservations with non-realist construals of theological language, I will assume in this section that the reader is sufficiently persuaded by what I have said to give theological realism a try.  Theological realism, simply put, is the view that God, and divine states of affairs generally, exist and have the particular contour they have apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.   Theological realism is thus a species of external realism, the view the world consists of entities, properties, events, relations and states of affairs which, broadly speaking, exists independently of our human perceptual and conceptual processing, or, more to the point, apart from our epistemic structures and capabilities.   We might call this the independence thesis with regard to external realism. 

I am convinced with many others that external realism makes two other important claims as well.  The first is the correspondence thesis which claims that statements about the world are true if and only if they correspond in appropriate ways with how the world actually is. (Clarifying what 'correspondence' and 'appropriate' might mean here is notoriously difficult.)  The other thesis of external realism one can be called the Cartesian thesis which states that although our theories about the world might meet all theoretical and operational constraints of an ideal theory, we could still be wholly wrong in our theory.  Since the theory is made true (or false) by how the world is apart from us, it is always logically possible to be wrong about everything that we might say about it.  Satisfying all theoretical and operational constraints does not a theory true make.  Only the way the world is can make the theory true or false.  The external realist thus seems committed to all of these: the independence thesis, the correspondence thesis, and the Cartesian thesis.  

Hilary Putnam in his famous "Models and Reality" distinguishes among three positions in the philosophy of mathematics.  These positions deal with both truth and reference in mathematics, and are thus, for him and for us, relevant to considerations of truth and reference with respect to external realism generally.  These positions are: 

• Platonism which, according to Putnam, "posits nonnatural mental powers of directly 'grasping' the forms" (Models and Reality, p. 24). This notion of grasping is primitive and cannot be further explicated.  Those familiar with Husserl's description of phenomenological intentionality will understand this quickly.  
• Verificationalism replaces the classical Tarskian notion of truth with verificational processes or proof.  Mathematic assertions are not true in any deep sense, but they are assertible on the basis of other mathematical procedures. Verificationist proposals within the philosophy of science of the last century are connected to this. 
• Moderate Realism, for Putnam, "seeks to preserve the centrality of the classical notions of truth and reference without postulating nonnatural powers" (Ibid.).  The idea here is that mathematical assertions are true, but that their truth does not involve one in a deep process of grasping or understanding the structure of some Platonic heaven.  

Putnam believes that arguments built upon the "Skolem-Paradox" are germane to a moderate realist perspective within mathematics and the external realist perspective in metaphysics generally.  These arguments are known in the literature as "model theoretic" arguments, and they basically exploit the difference in model theory between what might be intended and what might be said.  If one is a non-naturalist when it comes to semantics -- that is, if one thinks that semantic objects, properties, relations and functions are natural objects and does not involve non-natural magic -- then one has a problem with reference, because many models can make true the very same class of sentences.  This means, that one cannot naturally fix reference, that is, what the sentences say is logically independent from what one might mean to say in their saying.  

Putnam draws conclusions from this that are quite far reaching.  For instance, he claims that metaphysical realism (external realism generally) in incoherent, and that 'brain in vat' or 'evil demon" (Descartes) scenarios cannot even be coherently stated.  Putnam throughout tries to show that, because of the problem of reference, one cannot even state the conditions necessary to formulate the brain-in-vat/evil demon hypothesis. In other words, the necessary conditions for the possibility of posing the brain-in-vat scenario cannot obtain because a certain type of reference must be had by the language in stating the scenario, and since this type of reference cannot be had, the scenario cannot be coherently stated.  In other words, while it might appear that we could be a brain in a vat, we really can't be one, for to be one demands that we can refer to being a brain in a vat, and this we cannot do.  

Putnam employs a bit of a technical branch of logic known as model theory and there are considerable arguments in the literature about the effectiveness of his employment of these resources.  There are arguments as to the number and effectiveness of distinct model-theoretic arguments that Putnam uses, and their ultimate effectiveness in attacking metaphysical realism. All of this, I will lay out at another time.  What is important for us, however, is this question: Why is any of this important for theology? 

III

I believe that theological language must be given a realist construal if we are to retain it.  Long ago, I argued that the arguments for the elimination of theological language are strong, and that only a realist interpretation of theological language will likely stem the collapse of such language into reduction and ultimate elimination.  I can't rehearse that here, but know that I believe that theological realism best coheres with the principle that to be is to have causal powers. 

Notice now that if we afford to theological language realist truth conditions we seem to be interpreting it in ways that best connect to the classical Christian tradition.  Believers throughout the centuries assumed that there is a God, that one could refer to God, and that once could talk meaningfully about God's relationship with His universe, both in terms of creation and redemption.  It is extremely difficult, I think, to argue that the horizon of the Reformation is one in which one of the three following is not presupposed: theological realism, semantic realism, and theophysical causation.  The Reformers thought that God exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, that our language about God is true or false apart from the ways in which we verify or come to hold it true or false, and that God is in principle capable of causal relations with nature and the historical realities of nature.  

So on the assumption of external realism when it comes to theology, what are the repercussions of model-theoretic arguments on theological semantics?  

At this point we must appreciate how important reference is for theological language.  We are using theological words and phrases, and if we must ultimately give a realist construal to theological language then reference turns out to be the key to theological semantics generally.  'God is in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself' is true only if 'God' refers, 'Christ' refers, 'world' refers, and the relation of 'reconciling' can be drawn between the world and Christ.  But now the question, if reference is so important, why cannot it be something intended?  Why can we not simply say that intentionality fixes reference and that we don't need to worry about model-theoretic considerations at all?   Remember, Putnam had said that model-theoretic arguments really apply to the moderate realist in mathematics and the metaphysical realist; they are not aimed at one who holds that intentionality can be fixed nonnaturally by something like Husserl's "ego rays."  If one wants to hold intentionality as a nonexplicatable primitive, then can't we simply say that our intentionality determines reference in the theological order, as well as the mathematical and metaphysical orders? 

Here is the problem with this response.  While one might hold that one can intend cherries or trees by nonnaturally fixing one's gaze upon them, one cannot seem easily to do that when it comes to God or the inner workings of the Trinity.  After all, "nobody has ever seen God."  How can one intend that which has no clear content?  The theological tradition knew the apophatic nature of God-talk.  We can never be given the proper content to think God, because the content of our thoughts pertain to the finite order and God is infinite. Our thoughts of God do not thus determine our reference to God; our intentionality cannot issue in reference, because we cannot be given that by virtue of which reference is determined. Instead of intentionality granting an intensionality that determines reference, our theological language -- the language of the tradition -- speaks about God and God's relationship to His creation.  The ways of talking about God are very important indeed!  God's name is that by virtue of which reference is established, and maybe for Christians -- or perhaps all the monotheistic religions of the west -- this happened at the burning bush.  (Recall here Kripke's "initial baptism" of the tretragrammaton at the burning bush in Exodus.) 

It is important here to grasp what is at stake. If intentionality cannot fix reference to the divine, and if we don't want to give up truth to some verificationist-inspired theological position -- that is to say, if we want to be realists in theology -- then we seem to find ourselves in theology with no other option than to have to take the model-theoretic arguments seriously with regard to theological realism.  This means that not only are model-theoretic arguments relevant to theology, they might be crucial to its very future.  If model-theoretic arguments yield a knock-out blow to external realism, of which theological realism is a species, and if realism is essential in providing a defendable semantics for theology, then model-theoretic arguments may pose a much deeper threat to theological discourse than we previously might have thought. 

So what is at stake with respect to model-theoretic consideration in theological semantics?  I think it likely that the future of theology itself might be at stake. But consideration of this must await another time.  It is upon that which I am toiling a new manuscript.  

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?  

Theology and Metaphysics

Theology and philosophy have always been deeply related, though each has often tried to disown the other.  The ways in which they have related to each other are often overlooked by those believing they already know what the relationship is or ought to be.  

We hear much these days about the destruction of the history of onto-theology.  Theology, we are told, must move forward without the help of metaphysics.  The story is that metaphysics is bad, that metaphyscis is, in the words of one Christian theologian, "death dealing."  But why the rancor against metaphysics?  

The story of the exclusion of metaphysics from theology is a long and complicated one, a story whose tellers carry presuppositions about which they are often unaware.  I tell the story in the following paragraphs.   

Once upon a time 2,400 years ago, Greek philosophers, thinking deeply about things, recognized that there were certain problems connected with knowing the world and our way around in that world.  If everything that is, is in process (Heraclitus), then how could it be that there is anything stable in the world to know.  If one can never step into the same river twice -- that is, if the matter of the river is alway changing -- then how can one speak meaningfully about a river at all? But we do speak meaningfully about rivers.  Thus, there must be something stable about which we speak when we talk about things in the world, especially when we talk about how things in the world change.  It seems that the condition for the possibility of change is that there is something stable and enduring to which change might be attributed.  After all, it is the same sheep in the field, though this ewe no longer has wool.  

I marvel at the work of Plato and Aristotle in their attempt to give an account of how knowledge is possible and how change is possible.  Plato, of course, advocated that there must be some stable and enduring forms which we know and about which our talk is about.  The form sheep, instantiated in this object before me, allows me to speak truly the statement, 'this sheep has lost its wool.'  

Aristotle gave us a metaphysics of primary substances, accidents and secondary substances that allowed us to make sense of our world.  There are basic unities called substances, of which certain can be "said of", and of which certain things are "present in."  The primary substance is this sheep, and the whiteness of its wool is "present in" this sheep.  However, 'sheep' can be 'said of' this sheep, and so can 'mammal' and 'animal'.  

Plato and Aristotle knew that before we can go about clearly investigating the natural world around us, and the complexity of ourselves, we needed language to do that investigating, language presupposing categories by which anything as such is know, and through which anything as such is.  A world in which there is only becoming would be a world unknown to us.  What was needed is the logos, the permanent possibilities by and through which things become.  

Christian theology found the work of Plato and Aristotle very handy when it came to talk about the divine.  Just as becoming needed forms by which the becoming my be and be known, it seemedthat God  was in need of such forms as well.  Without such forms, it would seem we could no more utter a word about God as we might utter a word about ceaseless becoming.   

But talk about God appears quite different than talk about the world of becoming all around us.  After all, we can see, hear, touch, smell and taste the world around us, but this seems not to be true of the divine.  God is supersensible; the divine is beyond all sensible finite being.  Categories by which we might know the world are categories we use when talking about God.  Metaphysics is born again in its attempt to take the categories that apply to the temporal and finite and use them to speak of the eternal and infinite. This seems quite reasonable because the categories themselves in their universal applicability seem to suggest the eternal, immutable and infinite.  The categories are not themselves comprised of the material becomings to which they apply.  If they were so comprised, they would not be categories, and the problem of stability and change would come back upon us again in full force.  

Medieval thinkers knew their metaphysics, and realized that reason itself dictates the use of metaphysical categories if there was to be anything stable about God and his mighty deeds that they human mind might know and that human language might speak.  Seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers often divided on where to put their attention, with Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz arguing passionately that rationality itself connects to the forms by which reality is grasped, a connecting that concerns the supersensible.  These great "continental rationalists" thought that proper application of reason could eventuate in knowledge of the supersensible, and ultimately through this, knowledge of the sensible itself could occur.  

Christian theology from the fourth century onward had linked itself arm and arm with the metaphysical.  And why not?  God as the eternal, immutable, impassible, infinite being is a denizen -- one might say the paradigmatic denizen -- of the realm of the supersensible itself.  No matter how large the field of the supersensible, God fills it, and even, at times, seems to strain against the borders.  After all, God as "that which none greater can be thought" must occupy the highest region of Being, though one must allow that God could at any time go to live in another realm entirely. 

God as the highest being quite naturally assumed the Grund (ground) role within all of being. While all beings in the supersensible have some reason to be that appeals to something outside themselves, God's raison d'etre must be included within Himself alone.  God is the uncaused cause, the unmoved mover, the necessary being grounding all contingency, the perfection of the medieval transcendentals of goodness, beauty and truth, and that by virtue of which the world has a consistency and stability allowing for human life.  

God as the ineffable, impassible, uncaused causer is the condition for His own actuality as well as the actuality of the world as such.  Why is there being and not nothing?  There is being because there is God and God is the one activity of being in all activities of being and the highest being.  Because there is God, there is metaphysical and physical order.  God has more being than His angels, who have more being than human beings, who themselves have more being than the animals, plants and minerals.  The "Great Chain of Being" determines the hierarchy of being, and every being on that hierarchy.  

The metaphysical realm of the supersensible is closed to all human sensing, but not to human thinking.  One can know something about supersensible hierarchies through reason, and through the reason-transcending showings of the supersensibe to human beings.  In the tradition, revelation stands on the side of reason and not on the side of the empirical.  Revelation and reason deal with the eternal verities, while the senses concern the temporal.  The first deal with Plato's realm of Being, the second with his realm of Becoming.  

Kant famously argued that the traditional province of human thinking, the realm of metaphysics itself, was epistemically inaccessible to human thinking. What can be known are those determinate perceptions (intuitions) that have been synthesized by our concepts into determinate objects of experience.  Human thinking as such could proceed in orders of conditioned and that which conditions, but such thinking does not access the supersensible it itself.  It does not carve the beast of reality at its joints. Such thinking is regulative; it is how human beings must think something, but there is no justified reason to think that how we must think something is the way that the supersensible thing to be thought is.  The transcendental subreption occurs when we confuse the necessity of our thinking with any necessity that the thing thought might have. 

With one fell swoop, Kant seemingly broke up the 14 century long marriage between theology and metaphysics.  "Doing away with knowledge to make room for faith" sounded good to many people in the day, but the pesky problem since the time of Kant has concerned what exactly does one have faith in?  

Fichte, Shelling, Coleridge, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and many others scavenged about for ways to think God beyond traditional supersensible formulations.  Perhaps one might think God as the whence of the human feeling of absolute dependence.  Perhaps God is found in the dynamism of the ego as it creates and surpasses the forms by which the world is known.  Perhaps God can be identified as the human effort to know the world through history, a knowing that is absolute when all that has been and can be known is known, a knowing that is simultaneously God reaching complete self-consciousness. 

But metaphysical ways die hard, and the post-metaphysical ways to think God suddenly seemed to be thinking God all over again through a new type of metaphysics. To think God as the transcendental field allowing knowledge to happen as a "laying out" or interpretation of God simply moves that which ultimately is from the prohibited traditional metaphysical transcendent to the newly permitted transcendentally unconditioned.  As that which ultimately conditions all knowledge, God is now thought as unconditioned conditioned, a step away from the uncaused causer, as it were, but a step that appeared to many to be not far enough.  

So it was the young Heidegger, reading the young Luther, who came to the conclusion that all of metaphysics, transcendent or transcendental, merely occludes that be-ing which is closest to us and in which we unavoidably dwell.  Heidegger declared that metaphysics is a practice in the "forgetfulness" of being because metaphysics simply lays out ultimate things with putative objectivity (present-at-hand being) while occluding the (ready-to-hand) practical fields of being in which human ultimately dwell.  Later Heidegger develops a radical critique of the "onto-theological tradition" of thinking God through derivative categories that ignore the factic life of Christians living always already ahead of themselves in anticipating the Second Coming of Christ.  One might say that onto-theology is the problem that has beset Christianity from its beginning and continually derails theology, which itself must ultimately concern human existence as they are "placed" or as the "find themselves" before God.  

This is the story of the great divorce between theology and metaphysics, a story that leaves Christian theology in the uncomfortable position of having to say something about God without using metaphysical categories.  But what can we say about God without metaphysical categories?  Although many books deal with this topic, It is actually quite difficult to answer this question.  If we don't talk about God then don't we fall into the black hole of apophatic theology?  This will be my topic in a later post.

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.