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

by Norman Kemp Smith

In this connection we may raise the more general question, how far the Ideal demand for necessity and unity in knowledge and existence can be concretely pictured. Kant gives a varying answer. Sometimes—when he is emphasising the limitation of our theoretical knowledge to sense-experience—he reduces the speculative Idea of Divine Existence to a purely abstract maxim for the regulation of natural science. When the Ideal occupies the mind on its own account, and so attracts our attention away from our sense-knowledge, it is an unreality, and perverts the understanding; it yields genuine light and leading only as a quite general maxim within the sphere of natural science. From this point of view necessary Being, even as an Ideal, can by no means be identified with a personal God. It signifies only the highest possible system and unity of the endlessly varied natural phenomena in space and time, and can be approximately realised in the most various ways. Its significance is entirely cosmological. It is an Ideal of positive science, and signifies only systematic unity in the object known. In being transformed from a scientific ideal into a subject of theological enquiry, it has inevitably given rise to dialectical illusion. At other times,—when he is concerned to defend the concept of Divine Existence as at least possible, and so to prepare the way for its postulation as implied in the moral law, or when he is seeking, as in the Critique of Judgment, to render comprehensible the complete adaptation of phenomenal nature in its material aspect to the needs of our understanding—Kant insists that we are ultimately compelled, by the nature of our faculties, to conceive the Ideal of Reason as a personal God, as an Intelligence working according to purposes. Only by such a personal God, he maintains, can the demands of Reason be genuinely satisfied.

These two interpretations of the Ideal of Reason are in conflict with one another; and so far as the Critique of Pure Reason is concerned, a very insufficient attempt is made to justify the frequent assertion that the Idea of God is the Ideal of Reason, and not merely one possible, and highly problematic, interpretation of it. If the Idea of God is a necessary Idea, it cannot be adequately expressed through any merely regulative maxim. It demands not only system in knowledge but also perfection in the nature of the known. It is not a merely logical Ideal such as might be satisfied by any rational system, but an Ideal which concerns matter as well as form, man as well as nature, our moral needs as well as our intellectual demands. If Kant is to maintain that the only genuine function of theoretical Reason is to guide the understanding in its scientific application, he is debarred from asserting that a concrete interpretation of its regulative principles is unavoidable. And he is also precluded by his own limitation of all knowledge to sense-experience from seeking to define by any positive predicate the transcendent nature of the thing in itself.

Such justification as Kant can offer in support of his assertion that the Idea of God, of Intelligent Perfection, is an indispensable Idea of human Reason, is chiefly based upon the teleological aspect of nature which is dealt with in the physico-theological proof. Mechanical science implies only the cosmological Idea: teleological unity presupposes the theological Ideal. Further enquiry, then, into the necessity of the Idea of God as a regulative principle, and its dangers as a source of dialectical illusion, we must defer until we have examined the one remaining argument.[1626]

SECTION VI
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF THE PHYSICO-THEOLOGICAL PROOF[1627]

Statement.—The teleological proof starts from our definite knowledge of the order and constitution of the sensible world. The actual world presents such immeasurable order, variety, fitness, and beauty, that we are led to believe that here at least is sufficient proof of the existence of God. Kant’s attitude towards this argument is at once extremely critical and extremely sympathetic. Though he represents it as the oldest, the clearest, and the most convincing, he is none the less prepared to show that it contains every one of the fallacies involved in the other two proofs, as well as some false assumptions peculiar to itself. It possesses overpowering persuasive force, not because of any inherent logical cogency, but because it so successfully appeals to feeling as to silence the intellect. It would, Kant declares, be not only comfortless, but utterly vain to attempt to diminish its influence.

”[The mind is] aroused from the indecision of all melancholy reflection, as from a dream, by one glance at the wonders of nature and the majesty of the universe....”[1628]

Meantime, however, we are concerned with its merely logical force. We have to decide whether, as theoretical proof, it can claim assent on its own merits, requiring no favour, and no help from any other quarter. On the basis of empirical facts the argument makes the following assertions. (1) There are everywhere in the world clear indications of adaptation to a definite end. (2) As this adaptation cannot be due to the working of blind, mechanical laws, and accordingly cannot be explained as originating in things themselves, it must have been imposed upon them from without; and there must therefore exist, apart from the sensible world, an intelligent Being who has arranged it according to ideas antecedently formed. (3) As there is unity in the reciprocal relations of the parts of the universe as portions of a single edifice, and as the universe is infinite in extent and inexhaustible in variety, its intelligent cause must be single, all-powerful, all-wise, i.e. God.

Now, even granting for the sake of argument the admissibility of these assertions, they enable us to infer only an intelligent author of the purposive form of nature, not of its matter, only an architect who is very much hampered by the inadaptability of the material in which he has to work, not a Creator to whose will everything is due. To prove the contingency of matter itself, we should have to establish the truth of the cosmological proof.

But the assumptions implied even in the demonstration that God exists as a formative power, are by no means beyond dispute. Why may not nature be regarded as giving form to itself by its blindly working forces? Can it really be proved that nature is a work of art that demands an artificer as certainly as does a house, or a ship, or a clock? Kant’s argument is at this point extremely brief, and I shall so far digress from the statement of it, which he here gives, as to supplement it from his other writings. Even so-called dead matter is not merely inert. By its inherent powers of gravity and chemical attraction it spontaneously gives rise to the most wonderful forms. When Clarke and Voltaire, in their first enthusiasm over Newton’s great discovery, asserted that the planetary system must have been divinely created, each planet being launched in the tangent of its orbit by the finger of God, just as a wheel must be fixed into its place by the hand of the mechanician, they under-estimated the organising power of blind inanimate nature. As Kant argued in his early treatise,[1629] the planetary system can quite well have arisen, and, as it would seem, actually has come into existence, through the action of blindly working laws. The mechanical principles which account for its present maintenance will also account for its origin and development. But it is when we turn to animate nature, which is the chief source from which arguments for design are derived, that the insufficiency of the teleological argument becomes most manifest. As Kant points out in the Critique of Judgment, the differentia distinguishing the living from the lifeless, is not so much that it is organised as that it is self-organising. When, therefore, we treat an organism as an analogon of art we completely misrepresent its essential nature.[1630] In regarding it as put together by an external agent we are ignoring its internal self-developing power. As Hume had previously maintained in his Dialogues on Natural Religion,[1631] the facts of the organic world not only agree with the facts of the inorganic world in not supporting the argument of the teleological proof, but are in direct conflict with it.