Kant's Conception of God

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KANTS CONCEPTION OF GOD- A CRITICAL EXPOSITION OF ITS METAPHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT TOGETHER WITH A TRANSLATION OF THE NOVA DILUCIDATIO by F. E. England. Originally published in 1929. PREFATORY NOTE: THIS essay is an attempt to follow critically the development of Kants metaphysical thought with special reference to the concept of God, a concept which furnishes a sort of vantage ground from which to -estimate tM6 significance of the changes in Kants philosophical outlook, while itself re maining throughout substantially the same in content. I shall try to show that in his recoil from the speculative metaphysics of the Wolffian school Kant continued to conceive of the universe, after the manner of Leibniz, r as consisting of substances whose reciprocal commercium was made possible through their common origin as essences in the being of God. After tracing briefly the gradual emer gence of those considerations which ultimately led to the critical position, I shall try to show that by viewing epistemology as a species of logic Kant was led to a confused exposition of the critical doctrine of judgment, and in particular of the function of the categories. There upon I shall endeavour to make clear that from the critical premises rightly construed, the subjectivism characteristic of one trend of Kants thought does not follow, and that what has been called his phenomenalism must be seriously qualified. The categories will not, that is to say, evince themselves as constitutive of objects, but as principles of interpretation, and the critical theory of knowledge will not render metaphysics impossible Kant himself declared 3 that the transcendental philosophy had for its object the founding of metaphysics, but prepare the ground for a new meta physics. Turning to the concept of God in the critical period, I shall seek to justify the position that Kants artificial deduction of the Ideal of pure reason and his general Kant was influenced but little by Spinozas philosophy. KANTS CONCEPTION OF GOD formulation of the problem of the unconditioned are really of minor importance, but that there is implied in the critical doctrine as a whole the conception of a necessary ground of the world of experience, that the idea of the unconditioned is logically prior to and involved in the notion of the con ditioned. Further, I shall contend that the purposivcness which admittedly is displayed in the organic realm is unintelligible unless the mechanism of nature be grounded in a supreme intelligence, and that finally the facts of the moral life, and in particular that of moral obligation, presuppose a moral order, and this in turn presupposes a supreme moral Personality as its ground. In conclusion, I shall venture to argue that the Ideas of reason, in so far as they are valid, are not properly described as heuristic fictions, as Kant was prone to describe them, but are at their own level involved in the progressive systematisation of experience. Ideas and categories arc alike metaphysically knowable, and the supreme test of their validity is their indispensability. The Idea of the uncon ditioned is shown by Kant to be indispensably involved in experience, and it was, I shall urge, largely because Kants judgment was influenced by a lingering adherence to the formalism of Wolffs logical school and to the crude psy chology of his clay that his transcendentalism was not ex tended over the entire field of experience, and the Idea of the unconditioned was not accepted as a valid metaphysical principle...