Kant and the Creator

In her brilliant book, Evil in Modern Thought , Susan Neiman summarizes Kant’s epistemology as torn between two themes: One, Kant’s insistence that our knowledge is not God’s knowledge, and that we should be content with finitude; two, that we still want to be God, and that this straining (evident in the categorical imperative) is a morally necessary: “Kant never let us forget either the extent of our limits or the legitimacy of our wish to transcend them. Neither is less important than the other.”

Neiman gives this very intriguing summary of the first half of Kant’s tension (I’ve broken up a long paragraph to make her points clearer):

” Dissatisfaction comes from the wish to be God. If any one claim is the message of Kant’s epistemology, it is this. Traditional metaphysics could not solve the questions it posed because those questions transcend the limits of human knowledge. To answer them, we would need access to the absolute reality of the world as a whole. Kant’s questions are so deep that once they are posed, they virtually answer themselves. Everyone else simply failed to ask them.

” Can we know things as they are in themselves, independent of whatever conditions we need to know them? The fact that we cannot is nearly tautological.

” Does human knowledge have conditions? Doubtless.

” What might they be? This requires work, and the first half of the Critique of Pure Reason is devoted to it.

” Do we create what we perceive, or are objects of perception given to us? Of course they are given – to anyone but God.

” What structures must exist to create the possibilities in which they can be given? Frameworks of space, time, and very general concepts lie behind to structure the unordered data of perception.

” Can’t we get beyond them? Beyond space? Beyond time?

” I don’t want to be God. Of course not.

” Just to know things as they really are. Without the conditions that make it possible for human beings to know things?

” Without any mediation that is external to things in themselves. ”

Neiman answers the last point with a lengthy quotation: “If by the complaints – that we have no insight whatsoever into the inner nature of things – it be meant that we cannot conceive by pure understanding what the things which appear to us may be in themselves, they are entirely illegitimate and unreasonable. For what is demanded is that we should be able to know things, and therefore intuit them, without senses, and therefore that we should have a faculty of knowledge altogether different from the human, and this not only in degree but as regards intuition likewise in kind – in other words, that we should not be men but beings of whom we are unable to say whether they are even possible, much less how they are constituted.”

Several brief thoughts: First, Neiman’s Kant is a far more thoroughly theological thinker than Kant is sometimes made out to be; second, even so, Kant’s error might be seen as a problem with the doctrine of creation – particularly the odd distinction he makes between the objects of perception (which are given by God) and the “framework” that includes time and space that is a necessary condition for the objects to be given (but where did this framework come from?); finally, postmodernism appears on this reading to be a re-working of Kant, without any fundamental break – in which in place of categories there is some sort of linguistic context in which perception must take place.