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Regulative principles and ‘the Wise Author of Nature’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 October 2010

LAWRENCE PASTERNACK
LAWRENCE PASTERNACK*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078
*
e-mail: L.pasternack@okstate.edu
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Abstract

There is much more said in the Critique of Pure Reason about the relationship between God and purposiveness than what is found in Kant's analysis of the physico-theological (design) argument. The ‘Wise Author of Nature’ is central to his analysis of regulative principles in the ‘Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic’ and also appears in the ‘Canon’, first with regards to the Highest Good and then again in relation to our theoretical use of purposiveness. This paper will begin with a brief discussion of the physico-theological argument before moving on to the Appendix and the Canon. Finally, it will consider some changes to the role of the Wise Author in the Critique of Judgement.

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Articles
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Religious Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , December 2011 , pp. 411 - 429
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

Notes

1. Citations to Kant will be to the Akademie Ausgabe by volume and page, except for the Critique of Pure Reason where citations will use the standard A/B edition pagination. English quotations will be, unless otherwise indicated, from the Cambridge edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (gen. eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992–).

2. Some readers might be surprised by the claim that there is a deduction of regulative principles in the First Critique. As I will discuss later in the paper, the secondary literature is split on the issue.

3. There are no articles (that I am aware of) which focus on it. But it has been discussed in a number of books on Kant's philosophy of religion, including Allen Wood's Kant's Rational Theology (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1978); and Peter Byrne's Kant on God (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Kraft's, Michael ‘Thinking the physico-teleological proof’, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, 12 (1981), 65–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, despite its title, primarily concerns the relationship between God and purposiveness in the Critique of Judgment. Though Kraft's article deals with some issues similar to those treated in this paper, much of it cannot be sustained in light of more careful recent scholarship. For instance, central to his interpretation is his claim that systematic unity is actually a constitutive principle and thus we have knowledge (Wissen) vs belief (Glaube) of God's existence (see 70–73).

4. As I will briefly address later in the paper, Kant returns to this premise in the Critique of Judgment's discussion of hylozoism (see 5:394–5).

5. Wood downplays Kant's comments about the first stage and suggests that they are just concessions ‘for the sake of argument’; Wood Kant's Rational Theology, 130. However, Kant's positive comments seem too strong and too abundant. Thus I think, and Byrne does as well, that they have more significance; see Byrne Kant on God, 37–39.

6. For further examination of the issue of determinacy, see Wood Kant's Rational Theology and Byrne Kant on God.

7. This topic is discussed in the Lectures on Philosophical Theology, 28:1014. See Leibniz, Philosophische Schriften, 7:311; Wolff Gesammelte Werke, II, 3,187–189, and Baumgarten Metaphysica, §151. In Kant's Real Progress essay, he appears to claim that the concept of God (outside of its role in morality) is empty (see 20:304). Note that this discussion is limited to the conceptual resources relevant specifically to the ontological and cosmological arguments (see 20:303). Kant's point here is that since existence is not a predicate, ‘we can frame no concept of a being whose existence is absolutely necessary’ (20:304).

8. At A625/B653, Kant recognizes that the physico-theological argument does not establish just one Author: ‘there exists a sublime and wise cause (or several)’. The case for monotheism, according to Kant, can only be satisfied through the moral argument. See A814/B842ff.

9. See Paul Guyer Kant and the Claims of Taste, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 37–38; Rolf Horstmann ‘Why must there be a transcendental deduction in Kant's Critique of Judgment?’, in Eckhart Förster (ed.) Kant's Transcendental Deductions (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 157–176; Rudolf Makkreel ‘Reflection, reflective judgment, and aesthetic exemplary’, in Rebecca Kukla (ed.) Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant's Critical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 223–244. See also Tuschling, Burkhard‘The system of transcendental idealism: questions raised and left open in the Kritik der Urteilskraft’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 30 (1992), 109–127CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kinnaman, Ted‘The task of the Critique of Judgment: why Kant needs a deduction of the principle of purposiveness of nature’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 75 (2001), 243–269CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Note that Guyer appears to have revised his position. See, for example, ‘Kant and the systematicity of nature: two puzzles’, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 20 (2003), 277–295.

10. Henry Allison ‘Is the Critique of Judgment “post-critical”?’, in Sally Sedgwick (ed.) The Reception of Kant's Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling and Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 78–92; Reinhard Brandt ‘The deduction of the Critique of Judgment: comments on Hampshire and Horstmann’, in Förster Kant's Transcendental Deductions, 177–192; Grier, Michelle‘Kant on the illusion of a systematic unity of knowledge’, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 14 (1997), 1–28Google Scholar; Béatrice Longuenesse Kant and the Capacity to Judge, Charles Wolfe (tr.) (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 163–166. Note that Longuenesse's grounds are different from the others here mentioned. She connects the First and Third Critiques by way of the First Critique's ‘amphiboly of concepts of reflection’, finding in this section a reliance upon the powers of reflective judgment.

11. Allison ‘Is the Critique of Judgment “post-critical”?’, 82.

12. Henry Allison Kant's Theory of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 37. Though he is here discussing the Third Critique, he is again indicating that there must be a supplement to the ‘transcendental laws laid down in the Analytic’ (ibid.). I think this is a helpful way of positioning what is at stake in both the First Critique's Appendix and in the Critique of Teleological Judgment.

13. In the Dohna-Wundlaken logic, Kant claims that animals do not employ concepts (28:702). However, research suggests that many animals, most notably the great apes, do utilize concepts. The issue of animal cognition is explored by Mark Okrent in ‘Acquaintance and cognition’, in Kukla Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant's Critical Philosophy, 85–108.

14. This is the position of Allen Wood in Kant's Rational Theology, 141–142. He does not discuss the status of regulative principles in detail, but appears to see them as merely heuristic and thus he understands Kant to be rejecting the need to ‘posit’ a Wise Author's existence.

15. Later in the paragraph, we find one of the most quoted passages related to this controversy: ‘without it we would have no reason, and without that, no coherent use of the understanding, and lacking that, no sufficient mark of empirical truth; thus in regard to the latter we simply have to presuppose the systematic unity of nature as objectively valid and necessary’ (A651/B679).

16. The Wood/Guyer translation uses ‘sameness of kind’ for Gleichartigkeit. Though a more literal translation, I have modified the translation using instead ‘homogeneity’. This is the term found in the Kemp Smith translation and in much of the secondary literature.

17. See A303/B459–A305/B361 and 9:94–99. See also Allison Kant and the Claims of Taste, 32, and Longuenesse Kant and the Capacity to Judge, 90–95.

18. In the Critique of Judgment, this comes to be referred to as ‘heautonomy’ (20:225, 5:186). For a detailed discussion, see Juliet Floyd ‘Heautonomy: Kant on reflective judgment and systematicity’, in Herman Parret (ed.) Kant's Ästhetik, Kant's Aesthetics, L'esthétique de Kant (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 192–218.

19. Allison Kant's Theory of Taste, 40. See 4:448.

20. Ibid. See also idem ‘We can act only under the idea of freedom’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 71 (1997), 39–50. Regarding the relationship between concept formation and systematicity, see also the work of Hannah Ginsborg including ‘Thinking the particular as contained under the universal’, in idem Aesthetic Cognition in Kant's Critical Philosophy, 35–60 and idem ‘Lawfulness without a law: Kant on the free play of the imagination and understanding’, Philosophical Topics, 25 (1997), 37–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21. In Kant's Theory of Taste, Allison discusses an issue of paramount importance to the systematic character of regulative judgment: ‘that the very possibility of concepts as general representations presupposes a system of concepts’ (34). See also the cited texts by Ginsborg and Floyd.

22. Grier ‘Kant on the illusion of a systematic unity of knowledge’, 16.

23. For discussions of this shift in Kant's understanding of moral motivation, see my introduction to Immanuel Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (London: Routledge, 2002); Frederick Beiser, ‘Moral faith and the Highest Good’, in Paul Guyer (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 588–629; Insole, Christopher‘The irreducible importance of religious hope in Kant's conception of the Highest Good’, Philosophy, 83 (2008), 333–351CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Henry Allison Kant's Theory of Freedom, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 69–70. Based upon a reconsideration of the Collins notes, I am no longer sure whether there was such a shift. Though Georg Ludwig Collins attended Kant's course on ethics in 1784/5, some believe that these notes were purchased by Collins and are actually from lectures of the mid-1770s. Hence, it may be that even in the mid-1770s Kant distinguished moral action based upon the hope for happiness from a ‘moral motive’. See 27:284–285 and 27:287.

24. Though Kant also refers to the being who facilitates the Highest Good as the ‘Wise Author’ there is an equivocation which ought to be mentioned. Given Kant's objections to the physico-theological argument, the theological concept in use there (and, I presume, in the Appendix) does not include moral attributes. However, when Kant speaks of the Wise Author in relation to the Highest Good, I take it that he is there including moral attributes (as well as omnipotence and omniscience – see A815/B843). These two conceptions of God are compatible and one may be viewed as just a partial conception of the other.

25. Some have claimed, including Paul Guyer, that by the Second Critique, Kant maintains that the Highest Good may be realized in this life and thus abandons the postulate of immortality. For the sake of space, I cannot address this issue adequately here, an issue which spreads into the problematic of the unity of reason. But will say that there is ample textual support for a sustained commitment to the afterlife throughout the Critical Period. In the Second Critique, see 5:122–124; in the Third, see 5:469–474; in Religion, see 6:69, 6:126; in Real Progress, see 20:298–299. What this afterlife is like may be quite different from the contemporary image and may be closer to the doctrine of bodily resurrection common to the Early Church and Judaism. See 6:134–135. There is also some modest evidence that Kant was influenced by the Königsberg Pietist, Franz Albert Schultz, who preached that the afterlife is corporeal. See Manfred Kuehn Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 37–39.

26. Moral Belief pertains to those propositions which are rooted in pure practical reason. These include the Highest Good and the Practical Postulates. They are, according to Kant, held with absolute certainty, though independent of epistemic warrants. They demand our assent as they are ‘needs of reason’ (see A811/B839f and A828/B856f). Pragmatic Belief pertains to those propositions which are concerned with actions in pursuit of contingent ends (see A823/B851f). There are times, Kant claims, where in order to undertake a particular action, we must commit to the truth of a proposition for which we lack epistemic grounds. In the Critique of Pure Reason he offers the example of a physician who lacks adequate grounds to diagnose a patient but still must believe in some particular diagnosis in order to undertake a course of treatment. Elsewhere, he uses the example of a businessman who must believe in the profitability of a deal in order to agree to it (9:68), and a general who must believe in the efficacy of his strategy before ordering his troops to follow it (24:750).

27. Rudolf Makkreel briefly discusses doctrinal belief. Unfortunately, he does not clearly distinguish between it and moral belief – claiming that in the Critique of Pure Reason, doctrinal belief pertains to the Highest Good and its postulates, but in the Critique of Judgment, ‘a mere private holding to be true becomes a reflective mode of judgmental assent that demonstrates what is valid “for us”’; Makkreel, Rudolf ‘Regulative and reflective uses of purposiveness in Kant’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 30 (1992), 59Google Scholar. This confusion is, in part, due to a misunderstanding of Kant's use of Fürwahrhalten (holding-to-be-true). Since the publication of Makkreel's paper, there has been some important work done on this topic, beginning with Stevenson's, Leslie ‘Opinion, belief or faith, and knowledge’, Kantian Review 7 (2003), 72–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Chignell, Andrew‘Belief in Kant’, Philosophical Review, 116 (2007), 323–360CrossRefGoogle Scholar and idem ‘Kant's concepts of justification’, NoÛs, 41 (2007), 33–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am generally sympathetic with Stevenson's work but take issue with much of Chignell's treatment of the topic. One such concern is discussed in n. 31 below. For a detailed study of how Kant's understanding of belief changed over time, see my ‘The development and scope of Kantian belief: the Highest Good, the Practical Postulates and the fact of reason’, forthcoming in Kant-Studien. I also explore Kant's other examples of doctrinal belief and their fate in the Critique of Judgment in ‘Kant's doctrinal belief in God’ forthcoming in Rethinking Kant.

28. See also the Vienna Logic, 24:890 and the Jäsche Logic, 9:73.

29. One of my concerns about Makkreel's characterization of propositional attitudes is that he describes conviction as a ‘reflective feeling’. See Makkreel ‘Regulative and reflective uses of purposiveness in Kant’, 59. Conviction [Überzeugung] is a term Kant drew from George Friedrich Meier's Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre, the textbook from which Kant lectured on logic from 1756–1796. Though it is the subjective component of our attitudes (i.e. our psychological commitment to a proposition), rather than the objective component (i.e. the justificatory grounds for assent), it is not a feeling per se. Feeling may be attached to it, but conviction refers to the mode of holding-to-be-true which comes by way of grounds that are objectively valid.

30. Kant also states in a variety of texts that conviction comes in two forms, ‘logical’ and ‘moral’. The former pertains to knowledge and the latter to belief (A829/B857). He sometimes uses ‘practical’ instead of ‘moral’. See 6:62ff, 9:72 and 28:1082. Evidence that Kant views Glaube as an instance of conviction is abundant. For example, in the Critique of Judgment he writes that when a proof is ‘based on a practical principle of reason (which is thus universally and necessary valid), then it can make a sufficient claim of conviction from a purely practical point of view, i.e., moral conviction.’ (5:463). See also: 6:103, 8:142, Ref 2450, 2454, 2489, 9:72, 24:148–149, etc.

31. Though Kant nowhere uses doctrinale Glaube other than in the Canon, it is possible that the same concept is elsewhere called theoretische Glaube. This is the position of Andrew Chignell in ‘Belief in Kant’. The most significant use of theoretische Glaube is in Kant's 1796 essay, ‘On a recently prominent tone of superiority in philosophy’. If the two terms are indeed synonymous, then we have a clear repudiation of this category of belief in Kant's later writings: ‘there is no theoretical belief in the supersensible’ (8:396n); ‘even the word “belief” does not occur at all in the theoretical sense’ (ibid.).

32. In preparation for his deduction of this principle, he refers to ‘the maxims of the power of judgment’ which he says are ‘laid down a priori as the basis for research into nature’, and then cites such principles as parsimony, the continuum of formal divisions, and the distribution of those divisions within a system of higher levels of generality (5:182). The second principle corresponds to what Kant calls affinity in the Appendix and the third principle captures both homogeneity and specification.

33. Allison Kant's Theory of Taste, 37.

34. Here I have followed the Kemp Smith translation of ‘von der Idee einer höchstweisen Ursache die Regel hernehmen, nach welcher die Vernunft bei der Verknüpfung der Ursachen und Wirkungen in der Welt zu ihrer eigenen Befriedigung am besten zu brauchen sei.’ The Wood/Guyer translation reads: ‘it is from the idea of a most wise cause that we take the rule that reason is best off using for its own satisfaction when it connects up causes and effects in the world’. I find the Wood/Guyer translation of this passage syntactically awkward if not ambiguous.

35. This issue is, I believe, crucial for the deduction. However, it is hardly more than hinted at in terms of the subordination of genera and species. For a more direct discussion of the topic, see §76 and §77.

36. I am generally sympathetic with the position that human experience depends upon a ‘cognizable order at the empirical level’ and that the deduction's goal is to establish the necessity of regulative principles for the construction of this order. In other words, for discursive intellects such as ours, we rely upon these principles to organize particulars, construct appropriate general concepts, and organize these concepts into a systematic unity. As I see it, my discussion of ‘maximality’ offers a modest supplement to the work already done by Allison et al. It identifies, I believe, one of the primary changes to Kant's strategy from the First to the Third Critique's deduction of regulative principles and indicates why the Wise Author is dropped in the latter.

37. As noted earlier in the paper, this objection parallels premise (2) in the Critique of Pure Reason's formulation of the physico-theological argument. We can also find similar concerns raised in Kant's Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion; see 28:1063–1064.

38. In Kant on God, Peter Byrne discusses the heuristic role of God in the Third Critique, emphasizing the conceptual minimalism used by Kant. With regards to teleology, there is hardly more we may legitimately employ than a ‘bare reference to the unknown source of order’; Byrne Kant on God, 65. What we do say about God is ‘for a heuristic purpose and its substantive content is determined by that heuristic purpose’ (ibid.). As quoted above, the concept of a Wise Author is ‘a merely subjectively appropriate concept for the constitution of our cognitive faculty’ (5:437). I further emphasize that this minimalism extends to the existential question as well. As expressed in the passages I cite above (5:395 and 5:400), our use of the concept of a Wise Author of Nature to envision the source of purposiveness does not carry a commitment to the Author's existence.

39. We may relieve the tension here by contrasting between the theoretical role of the Wise Author, a role to which it is presumably adequate, and a different role (or roles) played by the ens realissimum. The reason why theology is thought to require the latter is because of what it is supposed to offer beyond explaining the order of nature. As discussed earlier, the concept of God is further used to explain the origin of the universe, to address questions about the status of morality, to support the legitimacy of our hope for the Highest Good, and as an object worthy of worship. If distinct from the ens realissimum, the Wise Author may not be due worship and so many not be suitable to religious practice. However, either it can still be considered on its own as at least suited to how we must think about the order of nature and/or as a relevant but incomplete way of thinking about God. As I discuss in n. 24 above, one theological conception can be understood as a partial conception of the other. Moreover, even if the ens realissimum is the idea of a being who is completely determined, let us not presume we fully grasp this idea. Regarding our construction of the ‘very deficient’ theologica ectypa, see 28:995–998 and 28:1016–1026.

40. This sentence was written in the singular, referring specifically to purposiveness. Please excuse my adaptation of it in order to have it fit regulative principles in the plural. This paper evolved out of some ideas which arose from my presentation of ‘Kant's doctrinal belief in God’ to the 2010 meeting of the Eastern Study Group of the North American Kant Society. I am grateful to the organizers and participants at this meeting, especially Pablo Muchnik. I would also like to thank Peter Byrne for his comments on this paper.