Kant’s fundamental tension

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:45 pm by Peter Leithart

Kant’s fundamental tension 2017-09-06T23:45:59+06:00 Peter Leithart

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What is the problem Kant is trying to solve? Near at hand, there are a host of problems: He wants to respond to Hume’s skepticism; he struggles with the problem of evil; he wants to affirm the advances of Newton without sacrificing humanity and religion. But if we look in a larger perspective, he is trying to resolve a problem perennial in philosophical study. He is challenging the desire, which he finds everywhere in the philosophical tradition, to know as God knows, to know unconditionally, to know by what he describes as an act of “intellectual intuition.” For Susan Neiman, a key motivation of Kant’s philosophy is to insist that we are not God, and to point out the ways that we forget it.

Neiman summarizes the problem: “Some philosophers were explicit in viewing the search for knowledge as imitatio Dei. Plato was so certain that approaching wisdom entails despising the sensual conditions which limit human knowledge that his Socrates is happy to die in order to transcend them. Leibniz views God’s knowledge to be less finite than ours only because he lives longer than we do. This gives Him time to unfold all the truths contained in complete concepts, hence to know why what seemed contingent was actually necessary. Had we the same amount of time at our disposal, we too could know the same. Empiricists, who stressed the sensual component of knowledge, thought there were principled differences between God’s knowledge and our own. Locke, for example, believed that only God knows essences, while we know accidents. But even those empiricists for whom God disappears entirely tacitly relies on a method of knowledge that would be appropriate to Him alone. Hume’s ontology contains neither God nor the soul, nor even causes or objects in ordinary senses. But despite the radical skepticism of his metaphysics, he neglected to pose the question put by Kant. In failing to ask whether there are conditions on perception of those bundles of impressions that do make up this world, Hume failed to note the fundamental fact about human knowledge: whatever the stuff we perceive turns out to be, it is not created by us. The Scottish atheist underestimated the magnitude of the fact that we aren’t God.”

Instead of attempting to overcome the “limits” imposed by conditions of human knowledge, “Kant thought every attempt to overcome those deficiencies was an attempt to overcome the limits imposed by the nature of the human.” The finitude of human knowledge should not be seen as a problem at all; it is simply a fact, “the fact about knowledge, defining every epistemological relation we have to the world.” He wasn’t opposed to advancement of knowledge, and he found lots to complain about in the world. But “the finitude of knowledge was just not among them.” Recognizing the limits of human knowledge means pushing various questions of metaphysics out of bounds: For Kant, “Whether the world as a whole is intelligible is a question without sense,” Nieman suggests.

-Kant offered moral reasons for rejecting the question as well, and his ethics is guided by the battle against idolatry as much as his epistemology. At the base of every moral criticism is the assumption that virtue and reward should coincide, that evil should not happen to people who did not deserve it. Not only should virtue and happiness be connected, they should be systematically and causally connected. What offends is not that virtue and happiness are systematically disconnected; what offends is the randomness of the connection, the fact that virtue is sometimes rewarded, sometimes not. Yet, “Kant thought all moral action has one goal: to realize a world in which happiness and virtue are systematically connected. Every time we act rightly, we are acting to bring the world closer to this ideal.”

If we are going to escape despair, we need to act in faith: “In Kant’s view we must believe that all our efforts to be virtuous will be completed by a Being who controls the natural world in ways we do not. We have no evidence that such a Being exists. But only such a Being could provide the systematic links between happiness and virtue that reason demands. Reason needs such belief in order to maintain its commitments: to waking up ever again, through half-success and failure, to continue the struggle to create another world . . . . He was sure that without some such faith, we would succumb to resignation at best, and cynicism at worst.”

This is a traditional faith in some respects, but it differs because of “Kant’s conviction that we should not know those connections.” Knowing the connections between virtue and reward is epistemologically impossible, and would be “morally disastrous” to boot. It would be disastrous because if we knew the connections, we’d spend all our moral time calculating for the best outcomes: “imagine a world where you knew what God knows: how every right action will be rewarded, every wrong one avenged. Could you engage in moral action? Act out of pure good will? Kant says that you could not, at least not consistently. Your relationship to God would be that which you have with your employer, writ very, very large.” Free action requires that we can “without enough knowledge or power – that is, without omniscience or omnipotence.” Kant puts it bluntly: “Our faith is not scientific knowledge, and thank Heaven it is not!”

This means that theodicy is inherently immoral: “knowing the connections between moral and natural evils would undermine the possibility of morality.” Theodicy further tends toward blasphemy: “Traditional metaphysicians expatiated on the glory and justice of God in the hope that He would be listening and would reward them accordingly. This is very wishful thinking. What else could drive them to deny the brute force of pain?”

Yet Kant doesn’t end with a “theodicy of ignorance,” which might be summed as: “God’s standpoint is not our standpoint; His wisdom is incomparable; what may seem to be against our interests may be in fact the best means of realizing them; unlike God, we cannot judge what is best for the whole.” Kant thinks this is still too much knowledge: “To say that God has purposes, though we don’t know them, is to say that God has purposes. That’s precisely what was in doubt.”

Such an idea is, for Kant, superstition, and this turns God into something un-divine: “Kant’s God hates sacrifices in every form. Kant saw little difference between burning an entrail, doing a rain-dance, or saying a prayer for eternal salvation, except that the latter is likely to contain more hypocrisy . . . . to win friends with God by pointing out the fruits of His friendship is to give instrumental reasons for being holy – a clear contradiction, and a vile one at that.” Virtue should be pursued for its own sake, and our ignorance of rewards is necessary for this morality. Pursuing virtue makes us worthy to be happy, however, even though we don’t pursue virtue for the sake of happiness. Because we are not in control, further, we cannot control the consequences of our actions, but only the intentions of our heart. Thus the latter, and not the former, are the essence of ethical action.

Yet, as much as Kant insists that the forgetfulness that we aren’t God is natural, and indeed of the essence of morality: “If the desire to reject human finitude is the desire to control the world just enough to achieve our rightly chosen ends, it’s a desire that morality itself should make sense.” The categorical imperative, in fact, is just such a forgetting: “In giving us this formula, Kant gave us a chance to pretend to be God. Every time we face a

moral dilemma, we are to imagine reenacting the Creation. What choices would we make if given a chance to create the best of all possible worlds?”

Neiman sees the tension between accepting finitude (the end of metaphysics) and the longing to transcend finitude as the central tension in Kant’s thought, a tension he did not intend to resolve: “Integrity requires affirming the dissonance and conflict at the heart of experience. It means recognizing that we are never, metaphysically, at home in the world. This affirmation requires us to live with the mixture of longing and outrage that few will want to bear. Kant never let us forget either the extent of our limits or the legitimacy of our wish to transcend them. Neither is less important than the other, though one way to distinguish analytic from continental readings of Kant’s work is through the ways each tried to forget. Analytic philosophy emphasized Kant’s recognition of the senselessness of our desire for transcendence; continental philosophy, Kant’s recognition of our longing for it. The different is easy to state: is our urge to move beyond experience a piece of obsolete psychology, or of the logic of the human condition? Kant thought it was the latter, for in fact he was perfectly split. The desire to surpass our limits is as essential to the structure of the human as the recognition that we cannot. Hence it’s no surprise that he was the last figure both traditions took in common.”

Even Kant couldn’t live with the disruption at the heart of his thought, and in the Critique of Judgment he tried to show that the world and the self fit together neatly. Consistent with his first two Critiques, Kant denies that we can know the whole, that we can actually establish the harmony and beauty of the world. Yet, he insists that a supposition of harmony has to be part of our approach to the world. Even here, honesty prevented him from over-estimating the beauty of the world. In his theory of the sublime, he introduces terror, disorder, overwhelming shock: “Primitive peoples experience it in horror and fear. The awe that accompanies the sublime comes not just from the feeling that I could not have created something as crazy as lightning, but from the thought that on balance, I would not have done so.”

At the last, Kant cannot escape his own tensions, and Neiman nicely captures this by describing him as “someone who could steal fire in one moment, and construct his own punishments in the next.” Or, “God creates as we do, and we create as He (said in a whisper, and said very fast). The world was made for our purposes, and we for the world’s. – But we can’t ever know this. We also can’t know anything without assuming it . . . . The world is my world, and then of course it isn’t. In the face of all this torment, why not quit and call it home?”

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