Abstract
Any claim about a possible immediate experience of God raises the question of the conditions of the possibility of experience in general (epistemologically speaking) and, especially, that of an immediate experience of God. The central issue is whether the former (general) and latter (specific) conditions are congruent or not. From within Kant’s theory of intuitions in his Critique of pure Reason, experience is always mediated and he argues that “[W]ithout sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none would be thought” (CpR B 75). Thus, if experience of God is to be immediately achieved, such an achievement would require the possibility of an intellectual intuition which, for Kant, is in principle impossible for humans. In other words, the conditions for the possibility of immediate experience of God—if it can be achieved at all—must be searched for within a different framework, which Kant opens in his practical metaphysics based on “the fundamental law of pure practical reason” (CprR 5:31).
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Notes
- 1.
In this paper Kant ’s works are abbreviated as follows: Correspondance: Kant’s Correspondence; Lectures on Ethics: Eine Vorlesung Kant’s über Ethik, 1780; Grundlegung: Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 1785; 2nd edition: 1786. Ak. 4:387–463 [Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals]; CpR: Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781 (A)/1787 (B) [Critique of Pure Reason ]; CprV: Kritik der praktischen Vernunft , 1788. Ak. V. [Critique of Practical Reason]; CJ: Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790, Ak. V. [Critique of Judgment]; MS: Die Metaphysik der Sitten, 1797 [Metaphysics of Morals]; Opus: Opus postumum [Ak. 21 and 22] (1790–1801); Prolegomena : Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können, 1783 [Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics that will be able to come forward as a Science]; Religion: Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, 1794 [Ak. 6:1–202] [Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason]; SF: Der Streit der Facultäten, Ak. 7:5–116 [The Conflict of the Faculties].
- 2.
Kant argues that “Necessity and strict universality are […] secure indications of an a priori cognition and also belong together inseparably.” (B 4)
- 3.
The question “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” (B 19) actually became the general problem of pure reason which Kant ’s transcendental philosophy – a system of cognition of objects insofar as this is to be possible a priori (B 25) – is built upon.
- 4.
Allison, Henry E.: Kant ’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense. New Haven and London, 1983, Yale University Press, 3–4.
- 5.
Guyer, Paul : Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge, 1987, Cambridge University Press, 11.
- 6.
In this paper I understand noumenon in its positive sense, that is, as an object that lies absolutely outside the boundaries of our objective cognition. For the distinction between negative and positive senses of the noumenon, see B 307–309.
- 7.
Concepts of reason are only regulative in the sense that they only “serve to comprehension, just as concepts of the understanding serve to understanding (perceptions)” (B 367).
- 8.
Prolegomena , 4:329, § 41, p. 83.
- 9.
See Prolegomena 4:332, § 45, p. 86).
- 10.
For this distinction see Kant ’s Grundlegung 4:414.
- 11.
In Kant ’s language, it “is requisite to reason’s lawgiving that it should need to presuppose only itself, because the rule is objectively and universally valid only when it holds without the contingent, subjective conditions that distinguish one rational being from another” (CprR 5:21).
- 12.
Beck, L. W.: A Commentary on Kant ’s Critique of Practical Reason. Chicago, 1984, University of Chicago press (Midway reprint), 169: the law is “given by reason itself to reason itself.”
- 13.
Some Kantian scholars have remained doubtful as to a transcendental interpretation of Kant ’s factum rationis and opted for a naturalistic interpretation. Paul Guyer, for instance, sees Kant’s factum rationis as a simple and easy “naturalistic strategy for explaining the normative force of the moral law for creatures like us.” (Guyer, Paul: “Naturalistic and Transcendental Moments in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” In Inquiry 50 [2007], 462.) He furthermore argues that for the moral law, “Kant at least suggests only two alternatives: we could follow the suggestion of the Critique of Practical Reason, and treat our consciousness of our obligation under the moral law as an a priori “fact of reason” that permits of no deduction at all, or we could return to the strategy of Kant’s pre- Groundwork texts and search for a naturalistic account of our valuation of freedom , an account which appeals to empirically ascertained facts about our deepest preferences but does not treat the moral law as a causal law of our natural identity. Since the first of these strategies seems to rely on a good deal of foot-stamping or, in historical terms, on an appeal to innate ideas, I would place my own bet on the second.” (Ibid.)
- 14.
With regard to the lawgiver, Kant excludes any kind of heteronomy. Thus in the Lectures on Ethics we are told that: “Professor Kant goes on to maintain, contra Baumgarten, that the moral law does not make it a condition to acknowledge a God and assume that the laws are His commands. Religion, in that sense, is not moral, since it rests on the disposition to carry out all duties as divine commands.” Kant, Immanuel: Lectures on Ethics. Edited by Peter Heath & J. B. Schneewind, translated by Peter Heath, Cambridge, 1997, Cambridge University Press, 303 (Ak. 27:546).
- 15.
Ameriks, Karl: Interpreting Kant ’s Critiques. Oxford, 2003, Clarendon Press, 176.
- 16.
Kleingeld, Pauline: “Moral Consciousness and the Fact of Reason.” In Kant ’s Critique of Practical Reason. A Critical Guide. Ed. Reath Andrews and Timmermann Jens, Cambridge, 2010, Cambridge University Press, 61.
- 17.
This view is often called Kant ’s dualistic account of the human will. See: Walker, Mark Thomas: Kant, Schopenhauer and Morality: Recovering the Categorical Imperative. Hampshire & New York, 2012, Palgrave Macmillan, 86.
- 18.
In this context one would understand how the Critique of Pure Reason serves as a propaedeutic to the system of Kant ’s critical philosophy. In the CpR, Kant had already made a distinction between synthetic and analytic propositions (judgments) where he maintains that the former are “judgments of amplification” because “they add to the concept of the subject a predicate that was not thought in it at all, and could not have been extracted from it through any analytic judgment” (B 11).
- 19.
Moors, Martin: “Kant on Religion in the Role of Moral Schematism.” In Philosophy and Religion in German Idealism. Edited by Desmond, W., Onnasch E. and Cruysberghs, P., Dordrecht, 2004, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 24–25.
- 20.
Moors, 28.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
See Opus Postumum 22:126: “There must also, however, be—or at least be thought—a legislative force (potestas legislatoria) which gives these laws emphasis (effect) although only in idea; and this is none other than that of the highest being, morally and physically superior to all and omnipotent, and his holy will which justifies the statement: There is a God.”
- 24.
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law in me. I do not need to search for them and merely conjecture them as though they were veiled in obscurity or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence .” (CprR 5:162).
- 25.
Letter to the Reverend Johann Caspar Lavater (April 28, 1775). In Kant , Immanuel, Correspondence, 79–80.
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Havugimana, T. (2017). What (If Anything) Can Justify the Objective Truth of an Alleged Immediate Experience of God?. In: Vassányi, M., Sepsi, E., Daróczi, A. (eds) The Immediacy of Mystical Experience in the European Tradition. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45069-8_14
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