Transcendental Theology

Abstract

Traditional metaphysics was both crowned and completed by God conceived as the absolutely highest or supreme being. And the ‘Dialectic’ explicitly takes up this question as well. While the ‘paralogisms’ address the unity of the inner world, of the subject, and the ‘antinomies’ address that of the external world, the final and most elevated part of the ‘Dialectic’, the chapter on ‘The Ideal of pure Reason’, is concerned with all-embracing unity in general. This is ‘the highest condition of the possibility of all that can be thought’ (B 391) and corresponds to ‘God’. While for Kant too we may say that God ‘completes and crowns the whole of human knowledge’ (B 669), his philosophy subjects the concept of God to a radical transformation. Within the general enlightened approach to our ideas about God which was already begun by the ancient Greek thinkers, Kant introduces a complex paradigm change of his own (cf. Höffe 1983). This change is the fruit of a long intellectual development on Kant’s part, who began by adopting the physico-theology of his early teacher Knutzen and gradually explored, and at various times defended, many possible versions of a metaphysical doctrine of God (cf. Förster 2001; and earlier Schmucker 1980 and Theis 1994).