In defense of Kant

Merold Westphal ( Whose Community? Which Interpretation?: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church (The Church and Postmodern Culture) ) notes that “realism begins as the claim that the world (the real) is ‘out there’ and is what it is independent of whether or not we might think about it.” But this simple claim is not all that is involved in realism since “no one actually denies this.” The further claim is that “we can (at least sometimes) know reality just as it is, independent of our judgments about it. In other words, our thoughts and judgments about the world correspond to the world, perfectly mirror it.”

Kant affirms the first claim (the world is out there) but denied the second, and this is “the paradigmatic antirealist.”

We don’t know the Ding an sich but only the world “as it appears to human – all too human – understanding. We don’t apprehend it directly but only as mediated through the forms and categories we bring to our experience.” The world as experienced is “partly the result of the way the real gives itself to us (as passive, receptive) and partly the result of the way we take it (as active, spontaneous).”

Westphal gives an interestingly theological spin to the distinction of phenomenal and noumenal in Kant: “although scholars usually ignore this fact, Kant regularly identifies appearances as the way we see the world and the ‘thing in itself’ as the way God sees the world.” The Ding an sich is what the world actually is because the world is the way God sees it. To deny that humans know the thing in itself, then, is simply to say that we don’t know as God knows; it is to apply the Creator-creature distinction to knowledge. Westphal concludes that “theists, who have good reason not to identify our finite, creaturely understanding of reality with God’s infinite, creative knowledge, have a sound theological reason for being Kantian antirealists.” He supports the point by citing Isaiah 55:9.

I agree with Westphal’s substantive point: We never know as God knows. Yet this way of summarizing Kant is too rosy because Kant’s metaphysics rules out the possibility of revelation. When we include the premise that the God who knows things-as-they-are communicates those realities to us in human language, and when we figure in the Spirit’s role in guiding that verbal revelation, and when we figure in the role of the Spirit in ensuring that this divine speech hits home, then the whole picture looks quite different from Kant. True, we have to interpret the Word God speaks to us, but because He is Word and because He has spoken, the God’s-eye view is not wholly unknown to us.