The Ideal of Reason

John J. Callanan

[May 2015 – 7180 words, incl. footnotes, not incl. bibliography]

I. Critique and Transcendental Theology

In his submission for the 1763 Berlin Academy Prize Essay competition Moses

Mendelssohn offered a defence of rationalism. Descartes had already secured two

incontrovertible proofs with it, he claimed, those of the cogito and the ontological

proof of God’s existence (Mendelssohn 1997: 275–6). The actuality of one’s own self

and the divine being could be proven from the mere analysis of the concepts of the

self and God respectively. The runner-up in the competition was Kant, who had

offered a more negative picture: not only had no metaphysical results yet been

secured, Kant claimed that “no metaphysics has yet been written” (Inquiry, 2: 283).

When Mendelssohn returned to the topic of God’s existence in the Morning Hours in

1785, the situation had changed, and he had to acknowledge the enormous influence

that the “all-quashing Kant” had wielded in the intervening years, especially with

regard to the ontological proof.1 In his view, Kant’s overall influence had not

obviously been a positive one (Mendelssohn 2011: xix). As he saw it, the opposed

trends of materialism and religious fanaticism had each continued to grow since the

1 In the “Ideal of Pure Reason” chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant claimed firstly that there

were only three kinds of proof (ontological, cosmological, and physico-theological) for the existence of

God (A590-1/B618-9); secondly, that they all had a dependency upon the ontological proof

(A607/B635, A629/B657); and thirdly that the ontological proof is irrevocably flawed (A592/B620 ff.).

For critical discussion of the dependency relation claim see Grier 2010; Wood 1978; Smith 2003.

1

introduction of the Critical philosophy. Mendelssohn’s hope was that there might yet

emerge a “Kant who will hopefully build up again with the same spirit with which he

has torn down” (Mendelssohn 2011: xx).

Kant himself might reasonably have been disappointed with this characterisation of

his ambitions. His goal had never been to tear down religious faith, but rather only to

usher in “the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit” (Axi –

note). Kant had explicitly included religion within the scope of “everything” here, so

as to protect rather than undermine religious belief. In Kant’s opinion, it was the lack

of critical self-appraisal amongst those who defend religion that meant that “they

excite a just suspicion against themselves” (ibid.) By deploying the method of

criticism he had hoped to undermine only the notion that God’s existence was a

proper subject matter for theoretical proof or disproof (see A641/B669). This negative

result was itself secured only so as to validate a distinct conceptual space for faith

(Bxxx). Moreover, Kant repeatedly argued in the first Critique and elsewhere not just

for the theoretical space within which one could maintain religious belief but also for

the practical demand that one must so believe.2

Yet it seems that such was the power of Kant’s negative arguments regarding the

impotence of philosophical proof that an image of Kant as explicitly or implicitly

hostile to religious belief persisted. Heine, perhaps echoing Mendelssohn, described

Kant as having “destructive, world-annihilating thoughts” (Heine 1986: 109).

Considered in the context of Heine’s claims, there is something ironic about Kant’s

expressed aim of protecting religious believers from suspicion. Ricoeur characterized

Marx, Nietzsche and Freud as the three masters of the “school of suspicion” (Ricoeur

1970: 32) – one that undermined our trust in our ordinary conscious experiences and

2 E.g., A809-11/B837-9, CPrR 5: 124-32, CJ 5: 484-5. For discussion see Beiser 2006; Gardner 2011;

Wood 1992.

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rationalizations as motivationally transparent to ourselves – but Heine had himself

already identified Kant as one such master. For Heine, Kant had a “talent for

suspicion” and that was most apparent when “manifested in the direction of thought

and was called criticism” (Heine 1986: 109). While Kant viewed critique as the means

for protecting religious belief from suspicion, his method for protecting it involved

laying bare the cognitive mechanisms through which we come to form such belief.

These mechanisms – ones certainly not always transparent to common consciousness

– show that both the belief in the existence of God and our characterization of Him

are both “natural” demands of human beings’ rational capacities.3

This approach threatens to raise as much suspicion as it allays. The famous first

line of the first edition of the Critique, whereby Kant attributed to reason itself the

“peculiar fate” (Avii) of being burdened with ideas that press questions which reason

can neither answer nor dismiss, would have seemed to any ordinary reader a strikingly

negative opening statement. Moreover, Kant is clear that the idea of God is one such

notion. Kant’s manner of defending the naturalness of the idea of God flirted with an

account whereby that idea was presented as a by-product of reason’s more ordinary

truth-generating operations. For some Kant’s talent for suspicion with regard to the

proof of the existence of God threatened to tip over into a suspicion regarding the

very idea of God itself.

It is perhaps unsurprising that such an image of Kant should have emerged. The

anthropocentric re-orientation of the Copernican turn must have appeared as

recommending replacing God with human beings as the source of the laws of nature.4

3 For Kant’s characterization of reason’s demands as “natural” to it, see Axvii, Bxxxi, B21-2,

A298/B354, A314/B371, A407/B433-4, A421-2/B449-50, A581/B609, A583/B611 – note,

A642/B670, A669/B697, A813/B841.

4 E.g. see A127. For a mitigating impression see Watkins 203’.

3

It is Kant who tells us, for example, that “human reason has a natural propensity to

overstep all these boundaries [of possible experience]” and that its “ideas effect a

mere, but irresistible, illusion, deception by which one can hardly resist even through

the most acute criticism” (A642/B670). Similarly, it is Kant who claims that in order

to protect one’s position from attack, one “must always seek the enemy here in

ourselves. For speculative reason in its transcendental use is dialectical in itself”

(A777/B805). Yet it is surely just as obvious that Kant also had a thoroughly positive

outlook with regard to the faculty of reason and its ideas. While acknowledging that

the ideas of reason can generate illusions, Kant does not lay the blame with the ideas,

which he claims “can never be dialectical in themselves,” but rather with our use of

them. The ideas themselves “have their good and purposive vocation in regard to the

natural predisposition of our reason” (A699/B697). That a representation that emerges

naturally from reason – which is the source of our ability to discriminate truth from

falsehood (A699/B697) – might itself be inherently illusory, is a possibility that Kant

cannot countenance. As such, Kant is committed to the view that if a rational

representation is a natural one, then it must have some positive epistemic function

within human experience. Contrary to Heine’s image, Kant’s attitude towards

reason’s ideas appears strikingly optimistic, perhaps even Pollyannaish.

My focus in this chapter will not be upon the familiar negative onslaught upon the

proofs for the existence of God;5 instead I focus upon the positive theoretical picture

that remains despite that onslaught, of Kant’s account of the origin of the concept of

God. As mentioned Kant holds that there is a crucial practical interest in and warrant

for our use of the concept of God. My focus here though will be upon some of the

elements of Kant’s account of the concept’s theoretical role that aroused suspicion.

5 For a small selection of the relevant literature, see Allison 2004; Bennett 1974; Grier 2001; Grier

2010; Plantinga 1966; Proops 2014; Proops 2015; Shaffer 1962; Van Cleve 1999; Wood 1978.

4

Kant complains that in the past no one has “taken trouble...to understand whether and

how one could so much as think of a thing of this kind as rather to prove its existence”

(A592/B620). This is the subject matter of “transcendental theology.” Kant

characterizes that subject matter as “the thing that contains the supreme condition of

the possibility of everything that can be thought (the being of all beings) is the object

of theology.”6 While knowledge of God’s existence is denied, Kant claims that pure

reason itself provides the idea that allows for a “transcendental cognition of God

(theologia transcendentalis)”(A334/B391).

Kant’s positive account is found in the third Chapter of the Second Book of the

Transcendental Dialectic, entitled “The ideal of pure reason,” but also in the second

half of the appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic, entitled “On the final aim of the

natural dialectic of human reason.” The primary goal of the former section is to reveal

a special kind of “sophistical inference, from the totality of conditions for thinking

objects in general insofar as they can be given to me I infer the absolute synthetic

unity of all conditions for the possibility of things in general” (A340/B398). This

fallacy – that of inferring the existence of things from reflections on the conditions of

thinking about them – in this instance produces a claim to cognize “a being of all

beings.”7

In these sections Kant also lays out how the positive conception of God is

warranted just because it is a natural demand of human rationality. The account

engages with the denunciation of anthropomorphism in religious matters criticized by

6 It is worth noting that Kant’s metaphysics textbook, Baumgarten’s Metaphysics, devotes Chapter I of

Part III (“Natural Theology”) to the concept of God, but does not address the question of the origin of

the concept.

7 In a letter to Schütz of 1785, Kant refers to Mendelssohn’s Morning Hours as a “masterpiece of the

self-deception of our reason” in its failure to attend to the fallacy (Corr. 10: 427).

5

Montaigne, Spinoza, Hume, and others. Kant was aware in particular of Hume’s claim

in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion regarding the attribution of the

property of intelligence to the explanatory ground of the universe. Hume’s claim was

that such an attribution is merely an instance of the unwarranted anthropomorphic

projection of rationality onto that thing, performed for the sole function merely of

serving human interests. Kant’s response is striking just because it does not deny

many of the essentials of Hume’s account. His position accepts there is such an

anthropomorphic projection. Secondly, he acknowledges that such projections do

literally mischaracterize the “being of all beings.” Thirdly, he is explicit that the

projections are made for the purposes of serving human interests. Nevertheless he

claims that our characterizations of God are warranted.

The chapter will be structured as follows. In the following section I briefly

consider one aspect of the historical context with which Kant was concerned, namely

that of the conditions under which the concept of God is originally formed. In §3 I set

out Kant’s own account of the origin of that idea as the transcendental ideal of

reason.8 In §4 I outline the analogical reasoning that is deployed in defence of the

characterization of God. I conclude in §5 with a consideration of Kant’s use of the

notion of an archetype of rationality. Kant in essence upholds the Leibnizian view of

human rationality as partaking in divine rationality but has to justify this claim within

the constraints of the Critical system. The peculiar position developed is that it is one

of the “interests” of human rationality that it projects its characteristics onto the idea

of a divine being, yet only for the purpose of subsequently viewing human reason as a

8 My analysis here focuses on the initial picture offered in the first Critique alone, considered in

relative isolation from the subsequent development of Kant’s thought in the Critique of Practical

Reason, the Critique of the Power of Judgment and Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason.

6

copy of that original divine reason. It is such aspects of Kant’s thinking that plausibly

aroused some of the suspicion in its reception.

II. The Origin of the Idea of God

In the Discourse Descartes complained that only the unwarranted presuppositions of

empiricists could lead one to think that there is “some difficulty in knowing God.” In

general, their error is that “they never raise their minds above things which can be

perceived by the senses” (AT vi. 37, CSM i. 129). While it might be the case that

sensory representations must be deployed to aid the expression of the concept of God,

it does not follow that the content of that concept reduces to such representations.9

One of Descartes’s targets here is surely Montaigne, who had maintained a far more

sceptical attitude towards the possibility of divine knowledge. For Montaigne our

conceptualization of God is inherently problematic, since the predicates we might

apply are only comprehensible to us from our familiarity with them in the context of

their imperfect actualization in the terrestrial realm. This imperfect context of content

determination then precludes their apt predication of a perfect being:

Nothing of ours can be compared or associated with the Nature of God, in any

way whatsoever, without smudging it and staining it with a degree of

imperfection. How can infinite Beauty, Power and Goodness ever suffer any

juxtaposition or comparison with a thing as abject as we are, without

9 See also AT vi. 37 CSM i. 129, AT vii. 305, CSM i. 360-1. Arnauld and Nicole follow Descartes’s

line of argument (targeting Gassendi) in the Port-Royal Logic (Arnauld and Nicole 1996: 29).

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experiencing extreme harm and derogating from divine Greatness?

(Montaigne 2003: 585)

The inappropriate ambition to cognize the divine is itself motivated by the “natural,

original distemper of Man,” namely the “presumption” that human beings might share

something in common with the divine (Montaigne 2003: 505). For Montaigne, the

only available means of representation of God available to us is that of analogical

representation, but the anthropomorphic projections it invariably produces reveals

more about human hubris than anything about a divine being. For example, he

describes virtue as that which is particular to human beings, on the grounds of it being

a status achieved in the face of the temptations and frailties of our nature. It follows,

he claims, that a perfect being, lacking temptations and imperfections as it does,

cannot achieve that particular status:

Take Prudence; that consists in a choice between good and evil; how can that

apply to God? No evil can touch him. Or take Reason and Intelligence, by

which we seek to attain clarity amidst obscurity; there is nothing obscure to

God. Or Justice, which distributes to each his due and which was begotten for

the good of society and communities of men; how can that exist in God?

(Montaigne 2003: 556)

In the Port-Royal Logic, Arnauld and Nicole attack similar approaches to the issue of

God’s moral attributes. They quote Cicero’s reporting of Cotta’s argument in De

Natura Deorum:

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[S]hall we then assign to God that prudence which distinguishes things good,

things evil, and things neither good nor evil? But if a being does not and

cannot partake of evil, what need has he to make choice between good things

and evil things, and what need has he or reason and understanding? We apply

these faculties to advance from what is revealed to what is hidden, but nothing

can be hidden from God. (Arnauld and Nicole 1996, Pt. III, Ch. 19: 200)

Arnauld and Nicole are outraged by this kind of “impertinent” argument, glossing it

as the claim that since God could have no virtues similar to those found in humans,

that therefore God must lack virtue altogether (Arnauld and Nicole 1996: 201). But

they are unfair to the argument here: the claim by Cotta and Montaigne is not that we

cannot conceive of a being having a perfect instantiation of that which is imperfectly

instantiated in human beings; rather, it questions how an attribute whose core content

is originally defined relative to a context of instantiation in finite beings could be

commensurably manifested in an infinite and perfect being at all.

III. The Notion of an Ideal

The question of the origin of the concept of God is then crucial for any account of

how true – and perhaps even truth-evaluable – judgments about God can be made. To

attribute the origin of the content to idiosyncratic acts of an individual subject’s

cognition would be to denigrate the content of that concept. While Descartes’s

solution involves positing an innate status for the concept, Kant’s response is that the

only way to secure the non-arbitrariness of the concept’s content is to assign it an

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origin in the representational capacities of the subject, not as an innate idea but as a

natural product of our rational cognitive functions.10

Kant’s approach involves finding an appropriate middle status for the origin of the

idea of God. The idea cannot be generated in the same way that the categories are

formed, i.e. in the particular context of the possible experience of spatiotemporal

particulars. Moreover, the idea is not of a general rule, but is rather that of a

particular thing, which Kant calls the “original image” or archetype [Urbild]

(A569/B597). It also cannot be that the idea emerges as a merely arbitrarily formed

concept, a hodgepodge of conceptual contents that reflect more the particular

expressive capacities of the individual agent than the object itself. Kant warns against

trying to express the notion of the archetype through any kind of example: the

example will always sully the notion and repeated failed attempts might “render even

what is good in the idea suspect by making it similar to a mere fiction”. Kant’s worry

that the idea must be distinguishable from mere “creatures of the imagination” is

similarly reminiscent of Cartesian complaints (A570/B598). In the Lectures on

Philosophical Doctrine of Religion Kant expresses the more general worry that “we

will have to take the materials for the concept of God from empirical principles and

empirical knowledge.” This risks that one might be picking “bad predicates” and

thereby engaging in an act of self-deception whereby we “let ourselves be blinded by

a mere show and ascribe predicates to God which can only be true of objects of

sense.”11

Kant’s key claim is that reason itself, considered as a transcendental faculty, is the

source of the generation of content (A299/B355). More specifically, as Wood puts it,

10 For discussion of Kant’s relation to nativism see Callanan 2013.

11 “Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion” (LRel), in Kant, Religion and Rational

Theology (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 365–6 (28: 1021–3).

10

Kant argues that “the idea of God takes its rational origin from the fact that it is

presupposed by any attempt to think of individual things in general as thoroughly

determined, and hence as absolutely possible” (Wood 1978: 62). It is in this way that

Kant thinks he has shown that the ideal is “grounded on a natural and not a merely

arbitrary idea” (A581/B609). Just as the forms of judgment provide a purely logical

analogue to the categories, so too can the purely logical operations of reason give a

guide to the conceptual contents that reason generates out of itself.

It is important that it is reason and not understanding that generates this content.

Transcendental idealism has it that it is only through the non-discursive

representational capacity of intuition that objects can be given (see A92-3/B125,

B146, B148, A139/B178). The categories considered on their own represent no

particular object determinately, but are merely the conditions for the representation of

an object in general (A51/B75, A93/B125-6, A290/B346). Kant relates the categories

to the possibility of experience of objects and claims that they generate cognition of

an object only upon receiving a spatiotemporal schematization (A139/B178, A145-

6/B185). The unschematized categories are insufficient then to represent a particular

thing, while the schematized categories would render a representation of God infected

with that sensible content and would risk “falling into that anthropomorphism which

transfers predicates from the sensible world onto a being wholly distinct from the

world” (Prol. 4: 358).

Kant seeks to locate the content as removed from our possible experience of

objects though not so removed as to render it an arbitrary or dispensable product of

rationality. He introduces the notion of an ideal in section one of chapter three by

appealing to the idea of something being represented in concreto.12 Something is

12 For an overview of the themes of Kant’s chapter three on “the Ideal,” see Buroker 2006; Gardner

1999; Grier 2010; O’Shea 2014; Wood 1978.

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represented in concreto when it is represented by appeal to a particular instance of the

thing (see A713/B741; also A241–2 – note, A711/B739). The categories can represent

something in concreto, Kant claims, when they have sensible appearances as their

“proper material.” This is to transform them into “concepts of experience.” They do

not contain within themselves the conditions of their own application to things and to

that extent they represent “no objects at all.” However, ideas of reason are “still more

remote from objective reality” since these concepts cannot be even possibly satisfied

by the presentation of a particular object, as “no appearances can be found in which

they may be represented in concreto” (A567/B595).13

These aspects of Kant’s model of cognition risk presenting the ideal as an “empty”

concept, i.e. as one lacking any possible object as a referent (A51/B75, A62/B87,

A77/B103, A155-6/B194-5). However, Kant introduces the notion of the ideal which

is “the idea not merely in concreto but in individuo, i.e., as an individual thing which

is determinable, or even determined, through the idea alone” (A568/B596). Although

sensibility allows particular things to be given, and although reason is the capacity

farthest removed from sensibility, the ideal nevertheless is the notion of a particular

thing. More specifically, the ideal is the notion of a particular thing that is somehow

given in the idea itself. This is the connotation of something being an idea in

individuo, whereby the metaphysical gap between a representation and its object is

occluded, and the idea itself somehow provides its own exemplification.14

13 As we shall see, they do however relate indirectly to such objects in relation to the infinite task of

securing systematic empirical unity (A568/B596).

14 Kant uses a characterization of Plato’s theory of the forms to illustrate the notion of

an idea that is itself an individual object which serves as the metaphysical original and

the “original ground of all its copies in appearances” (A568/B596). The reference is

possibly to the Timaeus and the cosmology of the “archetype” in the divine mind

12

Kant’s claim is that the particular content is generated by the structure of human

rationality itself, in this case by certain natural structures regarding our capacity for

syllogistic reasoning.15 The concept of God as the ens realissimum is generated by the

“principle of thoroughgoing determination” (A571/B599), which states that “among

all possible predicates of things, insofar as they are compared with their opposites,

one must apply to it” (A572/B600). The principle generates the thought of “every

thing as deriving its own possibility from the share it has in that whole of possibility”

(A572/B600). From this notion we secure the idea of a “sum total of all possibility”

(A573/B01). Kant describes the transition, involving two distinct steps, whereby one

moves from a principle of reason to the notion of an individual that is the “being of all

beings.” The first step starts from the claim that the principle of thoroughgoing

determination is a principle of the transcendental use of reason (A571-2/B599-600).

Kant argues that this principle itself generates a concept, which is the idea of the sum

total of all possibility.16

(Timaeus 28a).

15 Kant is notoriously sanguine regarding the connection between ideas of reason and

forms of inference, claiming that the movement from “the cognition of oneself (of the

soul) to cognition of the world and, by means of this, to the original being, is so

natural that the progression appears similar to the logical advance of reason from

premises to a conclusion” (A337/B394-5). In the case of the concept of God, Kant

claims that the idea emerges from the mere form of the disjunctive syllogism where

the inferences begin from an instantiation of the law of excluded middle

(A576-7/B603-4).

16 The claim is that in order to think of a thing as thoroughly determined, one must

presuppose something else, namely the idea of the sum total of all possible predicates.

Each object either bears a positive or negative relation to every possible predicate,

13

The second step claims that one can “refine” the concept of the sum total of all

possibility into a different concept, that of an “individual object that is thoroughly

determined merely through the idea, and then must be called an ideal of pure reason”

(A574/B602). This refinement involves the transformation of the former idea into the

notion of an “individual thing.” The key move is that one is not considering here

merely logical relations such as affirmation and negation, but rather transcendental

predications, i.e. the real presence (or absence) of predicates in individual things

(A574/B602). Kant claims that the real presence of predicates in things must

presuppose the idea of the whole totality of predicates itself considered as a

“Something” [Etwas] (A574/B602).

By the end of section two Kant claims to have shown that the nature of reason

itself generates the notion of a single original being, and that the concept of God just

is that notion of a “being that is singular, single, all-sufficient, eternal, etc.”

(A580/B608). The account that justifies the production of that content as natural and

non-arbitrary involves denying that it is directly related to the conditions under which

it might gain sense and significance. As such the idea is warranted, but only if it is

understood as offering “nothing other than a regulative principle of reason, to regard

all combination in the world as if it arose from an all-sufficient necessary cause…”

(A619/B647). The “object” of God is given, Kant claims, but “only as an object in

the idea.” An “object in the idea” does not serve to present its actual object to the

subject, but “serves only to represent other objects to us, in accordance with their

systematic unity” (A670/B698). Thus as far as the theoretical interest of reason is

concerned, the positive epistemic function of the idea of God is not to represent a

depending on whether it instantiates that predicate or not. The idea of a thing as

thoroughly determined is then the idea of the totality of positive and negative values

that thing bears to the entire set of possible predicates.

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distinct divine object. Rather it functions indirectly to aid our representation of

empirical objects.17 The way in which this function operates is that we are provided

with a warranted regulative assumption for the inference that characterizes the design

argument, that the “things in the world must be considered as if they had gotten their

existence from a highest intelligence” (A671/B699). The ideas of reason in general

function to provide a “schema of the regulative principle for the systematic unity of

all cognitions of nature” (A674/B702). That they can perform this function is only

possible because of their character of not being conditioned by sensibility. It is the

conditioning of sensibility, however, that allows for concepts to represent a

determinate object in the first place (see Prol. 4:355-6). Attempts to characterize

further the “Something” that the Ideal represents as a determinate object must

inevitably fail, or can succeed only by unwarrantedly attributing features of sensible

reality to them. Thus while these ideas must then be related to necessary rules for the

representation of empirical things, they themselves “should be grounded only as

analogues of real things” (A674/B702).

IV. Reason and Analogy

Kant nevertheless thinks that this notion of the original being can be supplemented in

various rationally warranted ways. While the preceding attributes are those that are 17 See also Prol., 4: 348. That the concept then has a primary role in relation to our

knowledge of the natural world is emphasized with Kant’s claim that the concepts of

God and nature can be substituted salva veritate in such judgments (A699/B727), a

claim perhaps unwisely made by one who took himself to be fundamentally at odds

with Spinoza.

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predicated of the being by a natural feature of the essential functions of reason itself,

other attributes may be predicated on weaker epistemic grounds. For example, Kant

clearly thinks that we are rationally warranted in characterizing the being as an

intelligence (A583/B611 – note, A640/B668, A670/B698, A697/B725). This might

appear to be just the kind of anthropocentric reasoning that Philo warns against in

Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, whereby we grant a “peculiar

privilege” to the “little agitation of the brain which we call thought” such that “we

must thus make it the model of the whole universe” (Hume 2007, 2.19: 24). For

Hume, the selection of rational intelligence as the crucial aspect of the divine being

requires a selection procedure and one that can overcome the natural anthropomorphic

bias (Hume 2007, 2.18: 24). Kant recognizes that Hume’s “dangerous arguments

relate wholly to anthropomorphism” (Prol. 4: 356) yet is nevertheless confident that

such projection can be warrantedly made. He claims that the “personification” of the

ideal of reason is again a “natural progress of reason in the completion of its unity”

(A583/B611 – note). This personification is explicitly that characterization of the

ideal as “an intelligence.” So here it seems Kant will take issue specifically with

Hume’s claim that the attribution of intelligence as a characteristic of the “being of all

beings” is an anthropomorphic projection. Kant does not deny this but rather claims

that it is a warranted anthropomorphic projection.

In the Prolegomena Kant distinguishes between “dogmatic” and “symbolic”

anthropomorphisms (Prol. 4: 357).18 The former makes attributions to a thing in itself,

i.e. God. The latter makes no such attribution – here instead “we attribute those

properties, nonetheless, to the relation of this being to the world.” Such an attribution

“concerns only language and not the object itself” (Prol. 4: 357) and should be

understood as revealing only the interests of the agent making the analogy. It is 18 See Notes and Fragments 6056, 18: 439.

16

unclear how the distinction is supposed to be drawn in a satisfactory way. Some

assistance is offered though by Kant’s characterization in §58 of the Prolegomena of

symbolic anthropomorphism as a product of analogical reasoning. In particular Kant

holds that some analogical characterization of the divine being is warranted just

because such claims merely express the equivalence of two relations, rather than

making a claim about the character of the relata themselves. This feature allows for

one of the relata to be something entirely unknown (or even unknowable), as in the

analogical claim that “the promotion of the happiness of the children = a is to the love

of parents =b as the welfare of humankind =c is to the unknown in God = x, which we

call love” (Prol. 4: 358 – note). The mathematical form of analogical reasoning

(a:b::c:x) is one Kant identified earlier in the Critique when introducing the

Analogies of Experience (A179/B222).19 Here the same schema is suggested as

providing an epistemically weaker rational basis for the characterization of God.

Several different challenges to Kant’s use of analogy have been identified

however.20 Since any analogical predication will have the form a:b::c:x, in order to

make such a predication one must have familiarity at least with the elements a, b, and

c, and the relation that exists between a and b. With these elements in hand, one can

analogically predicate that same relation as holding between the third known

something c and the fourth unknown member x. More than this is required however.

Also required is an understanding that a:b is in general the appropriate kind of

material from which to form analogies with x in question. Secondly, it must be known

that a and c in particular are similar enough in kind so as to think that they can be

plausibly linked for the purposes of analogically predicating the relation from the first

pair to the second. Why does Kant think that he can evade the worry that we are 19 For discussion see Callanan 2008.

20 For some of the following analysis see Gill 1984; Logan 1998; Wood 1978: 89–90.

17

unwarrantedly predicating properties of things when he claims that he is merely

predicating the relation that holds between things? On Kant’s view this move shows

that the intentional object of our predication is not a property of things but in fact

merely a property of human beings’ way of representing, specifically a claim about

only about “language” (Prol. 4: 357). Just as human beings represent the relation

between a and b as thus and so, we might analogically predicate that human beings

can represent the relation between c and x as thus and so.

Kant holds here that analogy is the proper method for ascribing predicates to God

in a way that is epistemically respectable and doesn’t fall prey to the risk that we are

engaged in a “mere show.” He claims that in the model of analogy (a:b:: c:x) we are

not claiming an “imperfect similarity two things, but rather a perfect similarity

between two relations in wholly dissimilar things (Prol. 4: 358).”21 Kant suggests that

the mathematical model of analogy can allow us to “form a concept of God and of his

predicates which will be so sufficient that we never need anything more” (LRel 28:

1023, p. 366). It is hard to see how this specification of the form of inference removes

the previous concerns. In this form, the claim is of a similarity between two relations,

each of which connects a pair of relata. However the claim that there is any similarity

between the relations presupposes that the things connected by each relation are at

least minimally alike such as to make sense of the comparison. A proposed similarity

between the relations then presupposes at least a minimal affinity between the

relevant pairs of relata. But this is just the assumption that Kant denies in criticizing

the dogmatic form of analogy. A vindication of our analogical characterization of God

would surely show that the identification of a ground of analogy is one shared by

humans and the thing targeted for characterization. But this would be to assume what 21 See also LRel 28: 1023, pp. 366–7; and Lectures on Metaphysics (Metaphysik K1),

LM 28: 1471, p. 558, n. 14.

18

is being inferred for the possibility of making the inference. Kant’s defense here can

then seem more like an apology for anthropomorphism than a vindication of it.

V. The Archetype of Reason

For Kant the power of discursive representation is not among with the capacities of a

divine being. In a letter to Schultz regarding the latter’s work on the Critical

philosophy, Kant complains that at a certain point “the divine understanding appears

to have a sort of thinking ascribed to it” (Corr. 10:557). When Kant models an

epistemically perfect agent, he does not characterize it as one who has perfect

discursive (i.e. concept-wielding) capacities but rather as one who has a perfect non-

discursive capacity of intellectual intuition (B145, A252/B309, B307).22 Human

understanding is the capacity to bring particulars under rules, the latter which indicate

a general “mark” that can allow us to group a plurality of beings together. The

position is reminiscent of that of Cotta and Montaigne: a divine being, lacking any

epistemic imperfection, has no need of any such mediating and grouping

representations, since such a being just immediately gives itself the thoroughly

determinate object in the same act of representing it. Thinking, considered as a

representational kind, is a manifestation of human beings’ cognitive finitude.

Despite the gulf between our representational capacities and that of a divine being,

Kant nevertheless posits an intimate connection, again at least as a regulative

principle. This relationship is that between the archetype and ectype, of the original

image and the copy.23 One of the more striking occurrences of the distinction would

have been in Hume’s Dialogues, where Philo claims that Cleanthes’s 22 REFS

19

anthropomorphism leads him to an egregious fallacy in formulating arguments from

analogy. In experience one attempts to move from ectypes to the archetype, Philo

claims, by thinking a discursive representation that has been copied from our

experience of individual things. Cleanthes then holds that the archetype is somehow

thought itself, but Philo points out that this is just to conflate our mode of representing

something with the ontological character of the thing represented:

In all instances which we have ever seen, ideas are copied from real objects, and

are ectypal, not archetypal, to express myself in learned terms: You reverse this

order, and give thought the precedence. (Hume 2007: 62)

For Kant, this order of explanation is on the contrary entirely valid. It is a regulative

demand of reason that we view human reason as a copy of divine reason. The notion

of archetype and ectype was central to the discussion in the Ideal of Reason. There

Kant described how the notion of an archetype was itself the product of human

reason:

For reason the ideal is the original image (prototypon) of all things, which all

together, as defective copies (ectypa), take from it the matter for their

23 Apart from Plato, the notion has many potential sources: Kepler‘s The Harmony of the World hinges

its entire cosmology on the notion of archetypes (Kepler 1997); Malebranche with whom Kant

acknowledged some affinity in the Inaugural Dissertation (2: 410) appealed to “intelligible extension”

as a divine archetype (Malebranche 1997, 138); Locke makes explicit use of the archetype/ectype

distinction (Locke 1975, III.iii.18), which is then picked up in Leibniz’s New Essays (Leibniz 1997, Bk

II, Ch. xxx, 263, 268).

20

possibility, and yet although they approach more or less nearly to it, they

always fall infinitely short of reaching it. (A578/B606)

In the Appendix to the Dialectic, Kant argues that the fact that the archetype is

demanded by reason recommends that it should be characterized as a perfected form

of reason:

The greatest systematic unity, consequently also purposive unity, is the school

and even the ground of the possibility of the greatest use of human reason.

Hence the idea of it is inseparably bound up with the essence of our reason.

The very same idea, therefore, is legislative for us, and thus it is very natural

to assume a corresponding legislative reason (intellectus archetypus) from

which all systematic unity of nature, as the object of our reason, is derived.

(A694-5/B722-3)24

Kant moves between the claims that we must view all the objects of nature as the

products of a divine reason and that we must view human reason as itself also a

product or copy of divine reason. We think of a divine being “according to the

analogy of realities in the world,” Kant claims, for the purposes of unity in our 24 Cf. Inaugural Dissertation, ID 2: 397. The claim is buttressed by the considerations

regarding the regulative employment of reason in the sciences. We must view the

empirical world “as if” it had a “single supreme and all-sufficient ground…in relation

to which we direct every empirical use of our reason it its greatest extension as if the

objects themselves had arisen from that original image of all reason” (A672-3/B700-

1). For discussion of the regulative employment of reason in science see Buchdahl

1969; O’Shea 1997.

21

empirical investigations, by “seeing all combinations as it they were ordained by a

highest reason of which our reason is only a weak copy” (A678/B706).

The picture that Kant is arguing for here would have seemed to many as

philosophically and theologically orthodox. Human beings after all were thought to

have been made in God’s likeness. A central claim of the natural law tradition is that

this likeness is expressed in both beings’ rational nature. The imago dei doctrine is

moreover a cornerstone of Leibniz’s way of thinking.25 However committed he is to it,

Kant cannot assume the imago dei doctrine as a metaphysical fact – for it too is a

claim that must be submitted to the “fiery test of critique” (A406/B433) – but he does

nonetheless, as we have seen, ground it within the resources of his system. This

restriction demands that the imago dei doctrine be itself justified internally as one of

the interests of human reason. This results in the peculiar claim that the relation of

human to divine reason is itself demanded by the analogical attribution of the

categories “of substance, causality and necessity,” concepts that Kant himself

acknowledges only get their sense and significance as forms of thought relatable to

sensible intuition. The peculiarity is supposed to be allayed however by the merely

“relative,” i.e. regulative and analogical, use to which we are putting these concepts

(A678/B706). Kant grants that these concepts “lose all meaning” and are “without

any content” when actually applied beyond the “field of sense.” On the other hand the

Ideal of Reason requires them since Kant claims that “we cannot think [the

determinate concept of God] except in accordance with the analogy of an actual

substance that is the cause of all things according to laws of reason” (A675/B703).

The categories do not lose their meaning though when put to the purpose of

expressing a relation that human reason demands:25 For a single example, see §28 of the Discourse on Metaphysics (Leibniz 1989). For

discussion, see Hillman 2010.

22

I think only the relation [Relation] which a being, in itself unknown to me, has to

the greatest systematic unity of the world-whole, and this is solely in order to make

it into the schema of a regulative principle for the greatest possible empirical use of

my reason. (A679/B707)

There is then again a paradoxical feel to Kant’s defence of the original being as an

intelligence. Human reason has a need to seek unity, which in turn demands that we

think of the sum total of all appearances as a unity grounded in a rational being.

However, the rational being that we then envisage is characterized as the archetype of

human rationality. Thus human reason generates from itself a model of rationality

from which it then projects onto God. Then however the order of explanation is

reversed and human rationality is viewed as a derivative copy of that perfected

rationality. Thus divine reason is modelled upon human reason only so that human

reason can subsequently be viewed as a copy of divine reason.

On Kant’s analyses, ordinary agents are unaware of the proper function of their

judgments about God, since what human beings are doing when they make such

judgments is simply not characterizing an experience-transcendent object. Rather,

such judgments should be properly understood as being “about our language” or about

the sense-making practices that human beings require for themselves in navigating the

empirical world.26 It is surely these aspects of Kant’s approach that led to Heine’s 26 This element is surely central to the contentious interpretive trend of taking Kant’s

philosophy of religion as marking a “shift to an anti-realist mode, or an allegorical

mode, or an apophatic mode” (Chignell 2009, 121) or – even more contentiously – as

making the claim that “[t]alk that had seemed to be about God turns out, on

inspection, to be, literally, about us” (Godlove 2014, 160). For a small sample

23

thought of Kant as a master of suspicion. Kant’s manoeuvres were made for the aims

of combating the illnesses of religious indifference and distrust in our own reason.

The thought that the cure might be more damaging than the illnesses is the legacy of

those manoeuvres.

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