A Metaphysical Kant: A Theological Lingua Franca ?

Kant’s Pre-Critical Intellectualism

Kant’s earliest writings in the 1740s and 1750s grapple, amongst other things, with the problem of causation. The notion of real causation between substances (finite created beings) was under pressure in Kant’s context because of perceived problems with the discredited scholastic way of influence, which posits something passing ‘from one of these substances into the other’, ¹ with properties somehow hovering from one substance into another. In Kant’s context there were three main options for explaining causation, or the appearance of causation. Two of these options ‘explain’ causation by denying that it is fundamentally real. Malebranche’s occasionalism asserts that there are no causal relations between created substances: with each event, God acts directly on the individual substance. Leibniz’s pre-established harmony similarly identifies the only real causal movement in the universe to be that which runs from the creator to each individual created monad. The representation of the world afforded to each monad unfolds according to an eternally determined plan. There is an appearance of harmony and interconnection between the separate and unconnected monads, only because of the pre-established design in the divine mind. The case for a real causal connection between substances was made in Germany by philosophers influenced by Newton, such as Knutzen and Crusius, who maintained that substances had real causal relations with other substances, by virtue of their existence alone.

Kant’s intervention in this debate is to insist that God is required both to bring substances (finite created beings) into existence, and—in a conceptually separate act—to place substances in a real reciprocal connection with one another, thus constituting a world. ² Kant argues in 1755 that substances are genuinely connected (contrary to Leibniz), but not connected by virtue of their existence alone (contrary to Knutzen and Crusius): they are ‘linked together’ in ‘the idea entertained by the Infinite Being’, ³ such that the ‘origin…of the reciprocal connection of things…is to be sought outside the principle of substances’, in God alone. ⁴

That the early Kant requires God to create and then to connect substances is more or less agreed upon by commentators. Where the interpretative issue becomes more complex is on the question of the order of priority that runs between the divine will and intellect. In this context, the debate intensifies around the following question: is God able to create a substance, and then to bestow upon in whatever relational and causal properties God wills; or is God constrained in the actualisation of relational and causal properties by the essential nature of the substances that God has created? The former position constitutes a voluntarist conception of the relationship between God and the relational properties of substances, with a contingent conception of the laws of nature that arise from these relational properties. The latter position is intellectualist about the divine mind in relation to creation, and essentialist about the laws of nature. To take a concrete example. According to the intellectualist, God can choose whether or not to create salt; but God cannot choose, having created salt, whether or not—in certain conditions—it will dissolve in water. If the substance does not dissolve in water, then it is not salt. The voluntarist will say, on the other hand, that God can create salt, and make it such that salt never dissolves in water, without damaging the identity conditions for this substance still being salt.

In my view, ⁵ we find the strongest evidence of Kant’s pre-critical intellectualism in his 1763 text ‘The Only Possible Proof for the Existence of God’. ⁶ The ‘only possible proof’ moves from the structure of all rational possibilities as such—the ‘essences of things’ ⁷ —to the existence of the divine intellect, in which these possibilities are grounded. Kant is critical of other traditional proofs for the existence of God that proceed along the following lines: we ‘discover an arrangement in nature, which seems to have been instituted for a special purpose’, and as ‘the general properties of matter on their own could not have produced such an order, then we regard this provision as contingent and the product of [divine] choice’. ⁸ Kant dislikes such proofs in that they seem to presuppose that it must be ‘quite alien to the nature of the things themselves’ to ‘stand in this harmonious relation’, requiring ‘someone’ to have ‘chosen to connect them in this way’. ⁹ On this model, God intervenes upon an intrinsically unordered matter, in order to make the ‘claws of the cat’ retractable in order to protect ‘them from wear’. ¹⁰ Such proofs, Kant observes, are deserving of Voltaire’s mocking suggestion that God created noses ‘so that we can wear spectacles’. ¹¹

The problem with such proofs is not that they overestimate the need for a divine creator, but—in Kant’s mind—that they underestimate the role of the divine intellect. The divine will does not work upon an intrinsically disordered and passive matter: rather, matter is always and already informed by the ‘essences’ of things which ‘contain within themselves an agreement which is extensive and necessary’. ¹² The ‘usefulness and harmoniousness’ that we observe in nature does not come about because of divine ‘art’ but ‘rather by necessity’, as ‘universal relations to unity and cohesiveness’ are ‘in the very essence of things themselves’. This is because ‘a universal harmony’ extends ‘throughout the realm of possibility itself’. And this is the case because ‘the essences of all things are without exception dependent upon one single great ground’, that is, the divine intellect. ¹³

Although the divine will decides upon ‘the existence of things’, it is the ‘internal possibility of things’ that ‘furnishes Him…with the material’ for the creation. As the ‘essences of these materials’ contains ‘an extraordinary adaptedness to harmony’, ¹⁴ order—both in the natural world and in the realm of a priori logical and mathematical relations—is not to be attributed to a free choice of God, but ‘is inherent in the very possibility of the things in question’, ¹⁵ so that ‘the element of contingency, presupposed by any [divine] choice, here disappears’. ¹⁶ The ‘union of numerous diverse consequences’ is ‘not a contingent union’, and so not a ‘product of a free will’. ¹⁷

Kant uses concrete examples to explain his position. The earth’s atmosphere is possible because of the harmony and usefulness that we find behind ‘the possibilities of the pump, respiration, the conversion of liquids…into vapours, the winds, and so on’. ¹⁸ ‘The characteristic of air, in virtue of which it offers resistance to the material bodies moving in it’ is to be ‘regarded as a necessary consequence of its nature’. ¹⁹ Similarly it is ‘inherent in the essence of the thing itself’ that ‘a celestial body in its liquid state should, entirely necessarily…strive to assume a spherical form’, as this ‘harmonises with the other purposes of the universe better than any other possible form’. ²⁰

This intrinsic harmony in the realm of essences is not, it should be clear, independent of God. It is independent of the divine will, but not of the divine understanding. Kant’s distinction is not between things that are dependent upon God (the existence and connection of substances), and things that are independent of God (the essences of substances). Rather it is between two types of total dependence upon God, which Kant calls here ‘moral’ and ‘non-moral’. We have a ‘moral’ dependence where ‘God is the ground of that thing through his will’; and a ‘non-moral’ dependence when God contains the ‘ultimate ground’ of the ‘internal possibility of things’. ²¹ It is the bedrock of intellectualist theology that the restraint imposed upon the divine will by the divine understanding is in no sense an external constraint upon God: not because God has chosen to be so constrained (that would put us back onto a fundamentally voluntarist footing), but because the essences that make up the divine understanding are themselves grounded in God, constituting the uncreated shape of the divine intellect, such that the essences are in no sense external to the divine nature. They are not ‘caused’ by God: they are God.

Into the Critical Period

I now move quite swiftly to make some bold claims, supported more fully elsewhere, ²² about the significance of this theological intellectualism for Kant’s critical philosophy. In his pre-critical thought, Kant considers that space (and time) are the external appearances of relational properties that hold between substances. As we have just seen God chooses to create these substances, and to put them in relation with one another: although having made these choices, God cannot interfere with the nature of these relations. In his critical philosophy, Kant continues to think of space and time as features of reality that arise from mind, except that this mind is now the human noumenal mind, rather than the divine mind. And this—I argue elsewhere—is what we know of as transcendental idealism: the thesis that features of the world such as space, time and causation are features of our experience of the world, rather than being descriptive of the world as it is in itself. Kant tells us that although God is the cause of ‘the existence of substance’, and of the ‘existence of the acting beings (as noumena)’:

Thus space is nothing in itself and is not a thing as a divine work, but rather lies in us and can only obtain in us… The appearances are not actually creations… The human being is the principium originarium of appearances (R 6057). ²³

Kant has a number of reasons for making this shift, some epistemic (and well-rehearsed in the literature), and others (less extensively treated) relating to his concern to make a non-compatibilist conception of freedom possible for human beings. In 1755 Kant is content with a compatibilist account of freedom, whereby all our actions are determined by God, precisely because God is the source of the connection between substances. Kant becomes unhappy with this conception of human freedom. In the early 1760s, after reading Rousseau, he begins to reach out for a more ambitious conception. By the 1770s this has become a strong central theme, where it is clear that Kant now wants for human beings a transcendental conception of freedom that previously he regarded as only possible, or necessary, for God. According to a transcendental conception of freedom, our actions are only free if they are not determined by anything external to us. Kant’s problem in the 1770s is how to reconcile our status as created beings, coming downstream of God’s creative activity, with our capacity to act freely, which involves being a first cause of our action. It ‘is not to be comprehended at all’, he writes, ‘how original causality obtains in a created being’ (R 4221). ²⁴

By the 1780s, Kant understands transcendental idealism to be the guarantor of human freedom, in relation to the creator. If space, time and (from 1781) causation come downstream of our minds, rather than God’s, then genuine freedom for human beings is a possibility. Kant is convinced that ‘regarding space and time as determinations belonging to the existence of things’ would lead to a ‘fatalism of actions’. ²⁵ Refusing to admit the ‘ideality of space and time’ means that ‘nothing remains but Spinozism, in which space and time are essential determinations of the original being itself, while the things dependent upon it (ourselves, therefore, included) are not substances but merely accidents inhering in it’. ²⁶ For this reason then, it is crucial for freedom that space is a product of the human mind, and so ‘not a thing as a divine work’ (R 6057). ²⁷ We are created, certainly, but as co-creators of space and time. The intimacy of the connection between transcendental idealism and freedom is underlined in the first critique: ‘if appearances are things in themselves, then freedom cannot be saved’ (A536/B564). ²⁸

Having in mind the pre-critical background, set out above, enables us to understand how many features of reality as we experience it can be, for the critical Kant, in some sense mind-dependent, yet also given and non-negotiable. In his early philosophy, the dominance of intellectualism and essentialism ensures that a reliance upon the divine mind does not imply a constructive or voluntaristic divine mind; similarly in his critical philosophy, a reliance on mind (albeit a different sort of mind) does not imply constructivism or voluntarism, because of the given and non-negotiable structure of the mind-dependent structures. Furthermore, properly understanding the role of the diving mind enables us to construe continuities in Kant’s conception of freedom, running from his pre-critical to the critical writings. As we have seen, although the divine will is constrained by the structure of reason, God is not constrained, because the structure of reason is not in any real sense external to God. Structural features of the conceptual space, made possible by Kant’s pre-critical intellectualism, survive and flourish in his critical thought: we have mind-dependence without voluntarism, and rational constraints that constitute rather than threaten freedom. The relationship that Kant’s pre-critical God has to the intrinsic lawfulness of all things is an intimation of something that will become very important to Kant: transcendental freedom and autonomy. In his pre-critical work, such freedom and autonomy is enjoyed only by the divine mind. In the critical period, human beings imitate the divine relationship to both deterministic causal laws on the one hand, and to the laws of reason and morality on the other. With the moral law, we imitate the divine relationship to reason as such: without having voluntarist control over reason, we nonetheless find that conforming to reason is in no sense an external constraint upon us.

We find some of Kant’s most distinctively intellectualist critical moments in his 1784–85 Lectures on Ethics. Kant tells us that:

The lawgiver is not always simultaneously an originator of the law; he is only that if the laws are contingent. But if the laws are practically necessary, and he merely declares that they conform to his will, then he is a lawgiver. So nobody, not even the deity, is an originator of moral laws, since they have not arisen from choice, but are practically necessary; if they were not so, it might even be the case that lying was a virtue… Such a being is then a lawgiver, though not an originator; just as God is no originator of the fact that a triangle has three corners. ²⁹

Implications for Theological Ethics

The first result then, possibly significant for the future of theological ethics, is that ‘autonomy’ for Kant does not involve the repudiation of God and religious belief, but is for him a theological category, whereby human beings are created so that they can imitate divine (transcendental) freedom. This has the potential to subvert the notion of Kant as a scourge of theology, who denies that we can speak about God, and defends a secular and Enlightenment vision of the individual and autonomous agent. The heart of Kant’s critical system emerges as a response to recognisably theological difficulties—about the relationship between divine and human freedom—and he continues to defend his system on the grounds that it solves these difficulties.

The theologian’s attitude to Kant on this point will be determined by fundamental convictions about the nature of the relationship between the creature and the creator. The key issue is whether we conceive of human freedom as involving a participation in the movement and freedom of God himself, or whether it entails enjoying our own God-like movement, which is only our own by virtue of being distanced (by a creative act) from divine action. The former, we might say, involves a quantitative identity between divine and human freedom, in that when we are free, we participate in the movement of God, who can never be a violent and external cause for the creature. The latter position seeks a qualitative identity between divine and human freedom: where we have a freedom that enjoys the same properties as God’s, which is only possible if it is our freedom rather than God’s.

Theologians who gravitate towards the first (quantitative) option will be more likely to lament what could be considered Kant’s competitive conception of the relationship between divine and human freedom, whereby we can only secure human freedom by limiting divine freedom (even if this is achieved by God’s own self-limiting). In this connection it is notable that Kant either neglects or critiques theological resources that would be needed to support such a non-competitive conception of freedom: such as the Trinity, divine simplicity, participation, concursus and the distinction between primary and secondary causation. Theologians who are more inclined towards the second (qualitative) option will be more appreciative of Kant’s aspirations and achievements, even if they do not agree with all the details. Theologians might also explore the extent to which Kant’s conception of obedience to a non-external but binding moral law is itself a participation in something that is ultimately grounded in the divine understanding. Even if our will and the divine will have a structurally parallel relationship to the moral law, what they are both bound to is ultimately the divine intellect, with ‘autonomy’ being more dependent—in the ‘non-moral’ sense set out above—on God (as divine intellect) than initially appears. In any case, although Kant might be a misguided theologian (depending on one’s theology), he is hardly a ‘secular thinker’, even in those areas where he is most often received as such (on the topics of freedom and the nature of human cognition).

Certainly the theological reading of autonomy and reason has the potential to spice up the rather tired debate between Kantian Rawlsians and theologians about the use of religious reasons in the public forum, possibly making both sides uncomfortable. For Kant, if a ‘religious reason’ means one that does not participate in the intelligibility that is God, then not even God could deliver such a reason. Equally, Kant would be troubled by the use of secular reasons in the public realm, where these failed to participate in the divine understanding. A demythologised Kant has long been a lightning rod for the public theism/atheism debate. A different Kant, a theological Kant, with his own theological problems—using the term ‘problem’ in its several senses—perhaps has an as yet under-explored role in interfaith dialogue, as much for the questions he raises, as the answers he gives.