A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'

by Norman Kemp Smith

“The expedient of removing all those conditions which the understanding indispensably requires in order to regard something as necessary, simply through the introduction of the word unconditioned, is very far from sufficing to show whether I am still thinking anything, or not rather perhaps nothing at all, in the concept of the unconditionally necessary.”[1614]

The untenableness of the concept has been in large part concealed through a confusion between logical and ontological necessity, that is, between necessity of judgment and necessity of existence. The fact that every proposition of geometry must be regarded as absolutely necessary was supposed to justify this identification. It was not observed that logical necessity refers only to judgments, not to things and their relations, and that the absolute necessity of the judgment holds only upon the assumption that the conditioned necessity of the thing referred to has previously been granted. If there be any such thing as a triangle, the assertion that it has three angles will follow with absolute necessity; but the existence of a triangle or even of space in general is contingent. In other words, the asserted necessity is only a form of logical sequence, not the unconditioned necessity of existence which is supposed to be disclosed in the Idea of Reason. All judgments, so far as they refer to existence, as distinct from mere possibility, are hypothetical, and serve to define a reality that is only contingently given. In adopting this position, Kant is in entire agreement with Hume. The contradictory of a matter of fact is always thinkable. There has, Kant claims, been no more fruitful source of illusion throughout the whole history of philosophy than the belief in an absolute necessity that is purely logical.[1615] In the ontological argument we have the most striking instance of such rationalistic exaggeration of the powers of thought.

Comment.—Had this criticism of the Idea of unconditioned necessity been introduced at an earlier stage in Kant’s argument, much confusion would have been avoided. It involves the thorough revisal of his criticism of the third and fourth antinomies, as well as of the whole account hitherto given of the function of Reason and of its metaphysical dialectic. The principle, that if the conditioned be given, the whole series of conditions up to the unconditioned is likewise given, must no longer be accepted as a basis for argument. Indeed the very terms in which Reason has so far been defined, as the faculty of the unconditioned, become subject to question. In that definition the term unconditioned has tacitly been taken as equivalent to the unconditionally necessary, and on elimination of the element of necessity, it will reduce merely to the concept of totality, which is a pure form of the understanding. Those parts of the Dialectic, which embody the view that Reason is simply the understanding transcendently employed, will thus be confirmed; the alternative view of Reason as a separate faculty will have to be eliminated. But these are questions which Kant himself proceeds to raise and discuss.[1616] Meantime he applies the above results in criticism of the ontological argument.

Statement.—In an identical judgment it is contradictory to reject the predicate while retaining the subject. But there is no contradiction if we reject subject and predicate alike, for nothing is then left that can be contradicted. If we assume that there is a triangle, we are bound to recognise that it has three angles, but there is no contradiction in rejecting the triangle together with its three angles. The same holds true of an absolutely necessary Being. ‘God is omnipotent’ is an identical and therefore necessary judgment. But if we say, ‘There is no God,’ neither the omnipotence nor any other attribute remains; and there is therefore not the least contradiction in saying that God does not exist. The only way of evading this conclusion is to argue that there are subjects which cannot be removed out of existence. That, however, would only be another way of asserting that there exist absolutely necessary subjects, and that is the very assertion which is now in question, and which the ontological argument undertakes to prove. Our sole test of what cannot be removed is the contradiction which would thereby result; and the only possible instance which can be cited is the concept of the Ens realissimum. It remains, therefore, to establish the above criticism for this specific case.

At the start Kant points out that absence of internal contradiction, even if granted, proves only that the Ens realissimum is a logically possible concept (as distinguished from the nihil negativum[1617]); it does not suffice to establish the possibility of the object of the concept. But for the sake of argument Kant allows this initial assumption to pass. The argument to be disproved is that as reality comprehends existence, existence is contained in the concept of Ens realissimum, and cannot therefore be denied of it without removing its internal possibility. The really fundamental assumption of this argument is that existence is capable of being included in the concept of a possible being. If that were so, the assertion of its existence would be an analytic proposition, and the proof could not be challenged. (The assumption is partly concealed by alternation of the terms reality and existence: in their actual employment they are completely synonymous.) As the above assumption thus decides the entire issue, Kant sets himself to establish, in direct opposition to it, the thesis, that every proposition which predicates existence is synthetic, and that in consequence its denial can never involve a logical contradiction. Existence can never form part of the content of a conception, and therefore must not be regarded as a possible predicate. What logically corresponds to it in a judgment is a purely formal factor, namely, the copula. The proposition, ‘God is omnipotent,’ contains two concepts, each of which has its object—God and omnipotence. The word ‘is’ adds no new predicate, but only serves to posit the predicate in its relation to the subject. Similarly, when we take the subject together with all its predicates (including that of omnipotence), and say, ‘God is’ or ‘there is a God,’ we attach no new predicate to the concept of God, but only posit the subject in itself with all its predicates as being an object that stands in relation to our concept. In order that the proposition be true, the content of the object and of the concept must be one and the same. If the object contained more than the concept, the concept would not express the object, and the proposition would assert a relation that does not hold. Or to state the same point in another way, the real must not contain more content than the possible. Otherwise it would not be the possible, but something different from the possible, which would then be taken as existing. A hundred real thalers do not contain the least coin more than a hundred possible thalers. Though my financial position is very differently affected by a hundred real thalers than by the thought of them only, a conceived hundred thalers are not in the least increased through acquiring existence outside my concept.

Kant presents his argument in still another form. If we think in a thing every kind of reality except one, the missing reality is not supplied by my saying that this defective thing exists. On the contrary, it exists with the same defect with which I have thought it. When, therefore, I think a Being as the highest reality, without any defect, the question still remains whether it exists or not. For though, in my concept, nothing may be lacking of the possible real content of a thing in general, something is still lacking in its relation to my whole state of thinking, namely, knowledge of its existence; and such knowledge can never be obtained save in an a posteriori manner. That is owing to the limitations imposed by the conditions of our sense-experience. We never confound the existence of a sensible object with its mere concept. The concept represents something that may or may not exist: to determine existence we must refer to actual experience. As Kant has already stated, the actual is always for us the accidental, and its assertion is therefore synthetic. A possible idea and the idea of a possible thing are quite distinct.[1618] A thing is known to be possible only when presented in some concrete experience, or when, though not actually experienced, it has been proved to be bound up, according to empirical laws, with given perceptions. It is not, therefore, surprising that if we try, as is done in the ontological argument, to think existence through the pure category, we cannot mention a single mark distinguishing it from a merely logical possibility. The concept of a Supreme Being is, in many respects, a valuable Idea, but just because it is an Idea of pure Reason, i.e. a mere Idea, we can no more extend our knowledge of real existence by means of it, than a merchant can better his position by adding a few noughts to his cash account.

There are many points of connection between this section and the first edition Introduction; and in view of these points of contact Adickes has suggested[1619] that the considerations which arose in the examination of the ontological argument may have been what brought Kant to realise that the various problems of the Critique can all be traced to the central problem of a priori synthesis.

SECTION V
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF A COSMOLOGICAL PROOF OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD[1620]

Statement.—Kant, as already noted, views the ontological proof as ‘a mere innovation of scholastic wisdom’ which restates, in a quite unnatural form, a line of thought much more adequately expressed in the cosmological proof. To discover the natural dialectic of Reason we must therefore look to this latter form of argument. It is composed of two distinct stages. In the first stage it makes no use of specific experience: if anything is given us as existing, e.g. the self, there must exist an absolutely necessary Being as its cause. Then, in the second stage, it is argued that as such a Being must be altogether outside experience, Reason must leave experience entirely aside, and discover from among pure concepts what properties an absolutely necessary Being ought to possess, i.e. which among all possible things contains in itself the conditions of absolute necessity. The requisite enlightenment is believed by Reason to be derivable only from the concept of an Ens realissimum, and Reason therefore at once concludes that this concept must represent the absolutely necessary Being.

Now in that final conclusion the truth of the ontological argument is assumed. If the concept of a Being of the highest reality is so completely adequate to the concept of necessary existence that they can be regarded as identical, the latter must be capable of being derived from the former, and that is all that is maintained in the ontological proof. To make this point clearer, Kant states it in scholastic form. If the proposition be true, that every absolutely necessary Being is at the same time the most real Being (and this is the nervus probandi of the cosmological proof in so far as it is also theological), it must, like all affirmative propositions, be capable of conversion, at least per accidens. This gives us the proposition that some Entia realissima are at the same time absolutely necessary Beings. One Ens realissimum, however, does not differ from another, and what applies to one applies to all. In this case, therefore, we must employ simple conversion, and say that every Ens realissimum is a necessary Being. Thus the cosmological proof is not only as illusory as the ontological, but also less honest. While pretending to lead us by a new road to a sound conclusion, it brings us back, after a short circuit, into the old path. If the ontological argument is correct, the cosmological is superfluous; and if the ontological is false, the cosmological cannot possibly be true.