Conclusion: In order for our faculties of understanding to be able to deduce anything about the objective world there must be a regulating force so as to make the relationship between our perceptions of the objective and the objective itself uniform and rational.
"Such a cognition . . . does not signify an imperfect similarity of two things, but a perfect similarity of relations between two quite dissimilar things. By means of this analogy, however, there remains a concept of the Supreme Being sufficiently determined for us, though we have left out everything that could determine it absolutely and in itself" (58/358).
Premises:
-Without anthropomorphizing the Supreme Being it is difficult to assume that it has any bearing on our relation to the Objective world (58/358-359).
-Our anthropomorphized Being is necessarily rational (Implicit)
-The only way to assume reason (or synthetic apriori judgements) are applicable is to assume everything is at least regulated by a Supreme Rationality (58/359).
-Avoiding anthropomorphizing, we do not attribute rationality to this Being but merely to the laws governing our experience of things (58/359).
-Without using the concept of God (a rational supreme deity) we merely make a claim about our relationship to the rest of the world as mediated by our faculties of understanding and rationality (Implicit).
-We must assume the world came from a Supreme Reason of sorts in order to avoid attributing the rationality of our deductions to the world in itself (58/360).
I’m a little confused as to your implicit premise that “Our anthropomorphized Being is necessarily rational (Implicit)”. What exactly do you mean by this? As I see it, this is what Kant is arguing against, that we attribute anthropomorphic concepts to a Supreme Being, which leads us astray in a metaphysical sense(§58/359). Why would it be “necessarily rational”? Are the terms, “necessarily” and “rational” Kant’s or the common use for them?
ReplyDeleteKant distinguishes between two types of anthropomorphism, dogmatic and symbolic (§57/357). He defines the former as when we attribute properties in themselves by which we represent objects of experience to the Supreme Being. The latter is when we attribute these properties to the Supreme Being's relation to the world. He argues against dogmatic anthropomorphism but is for symbolic. As a result, I think that the first premise should say relation of the Supreme Being to the world rather than the Supreme Being, so as to avoid confusion.
ReplyDelete@Brent
ReplyDeletethe type of Supreme Being Kant described at the beginning of this section is implied to be necessarily rational on the grounds that our perceptions are still grounded in a rational relationship to Noumena and this hypothetical Being (whose existence he is arguing against) would have constructed both the world and our perception. I added "necessary" as it seemed to be an assumption Kant was making that any Supreme Being could not be irrational, it also simply wouldn't fit anywhere in the argument.
@ 4Ture
ReplyDeleteI have to slightly disagree, while he would argue that the symbolic anthropomorphism makes much more sense, he does seem to imply that the Being itself is not even necessary and that more than a Being, a Relationship must exist. This issue actually is one of my bigger problems with Kant is that he does seem to attribute things to intelligent design when it's simply not necessary, even after he shows it's not necessary.
I think it is definitely important to keep in perspective the fact that Kant, while it may seem otherwise, does not seek to prove the existence of a Supreme Being or learn of the nature, positive or otherwise, of said Supreme Being (57/360). This premise is essential in Kant's definition of "Supreme Being", a being that he seeks to merely integrate as a factor of the greater theme of the possibility of a priori synthetic reasoning, and while I believe the argument outline and comments do refer to this in one way or another, it feels slightly overlooked at its core.
ReplyDelete