Kant distinguishes between the phenomenal world, consisting of the way in which things appear to us as objects of experience, and the noumenal world, consisting of the way things are in themselves, independent of our experience. Kant claims that outside of the phenomenal world and the objects of our experience, we cannot have determinate knowledge. “It is true,” he says, “we cannot provide, beyond all possible experience, any determinate concept of what things in themselves might be” (Kant 105). This holds true even for those ideas which we have always deemed most important and essential to human existence and thought: ideas of God, the immortal soul, and freedom. This is what Kant means by “idea” in his technical sense: necessary concepts whose objects are by definition outside all possible experience and thus beyond the limits of our reason to discover. But they are not therefore unnatural or wrong, Kant says. “[The ideas] are just as intrinsic to the nature of reason as are [the categories of the understanding] to the nature of the understanding; and if the ideas carry with them an illusion that can easily mislead, this illusion is unavoidable, although it can very well be prevented ‘from leading us astray’” (Kant 82).
Our minds are naturally led to posit the idea of God. Despite the fact that knowledge of God in Godself is impossible,
who does not feel compelled, regardless of all prohibitions against losing oneself in transcendent ideas, nevertheless to look for peace and satisfaction beyond all concepts that one can justify through experience, in the concept of a being the idea of which indeed cannot in itself be understood as regards possibility—though it cannot be refused either, because it pertains to a mere being of the understanding—an idea without which, however, reason would always have to remain unsatisfied? (Kant 106)Kant also notes that the transcendental ideas serve to show us the boundaries of the pure use of reason, as well as how to determine those boundaries (Kant 107). Metaphysics, says Kant, is placed in us by nature itself (Kant 107); so in a real sense, we have an inborn desire for God and God’s rulership over the universe. God is one of the three things which satisfy and complete reason, along with the soul and an intelligible world (Kant 108).
The problem, of course, is that we can never know God as God may be in Godself. But though we cannot know, we must still assume God exists in order to unify our reason and satisfy our innate desires for answers to questions which transgress the boundaries of pure reason. Kant’s solution is, rather than attempting to know God in Godself, we should see what we can learn about God in relation to the world as it appears to us. Only when God inhabits the boundaries of our reason can we discern things about God. We can speak of God only in analogical or symbolic language, avoiding Hume’s criticism of anthropomorphism.
God’s nature can therefore be constructed in the way of an analogy like the one Kant uses at the end of section fifty-seven. As the artisan is to the watch, the commander is to the regiment, or the captain is to the ship, so is the unknown to the world. In other words,
watch : artisan :: world : ?? (God)So Kant writes that while we are “compelled to look upon the world as if it were the concept of a supreme understanding and will” (Kant 111), we avoid the problem of thinking about God in the noumenal by not cognizing according to what things are in themselves, but “only according to what it is for me, that is, with respect to the world of which I am a part” (Kant 111).
Kant summarizes this strange tension in the following paragraph, noting that this solution bypasses Hume’s argument against theism.
We thereby admit that the supreme being, as to what it may be in itself, is for us wholly inscrutable and that it cannot at all be thought by us in a determinate manner; and we are thereby prevented from making any transcendent use of the concepts that we have of reason as an efficient cause (by means of willing) in order to determine the divine nature through properties that are in any case always borrowed only from human nature, and so from losing ourselves in crude or fanatical concepts, and, on the other hand, we are prevented from swamping the contemplation of the world with hyperphysical modes of explanation according to concepts of human reason that we have transposed onto God, and so from diverting this contemplation from its true vocation, according to which it is supposed to be a study of mere nature through reason, and not an audacious derivation of the appearances of nature from a supreme reason. The expression suitable to our weak concepts will be: that we think the world as if it derives, as regards its existence and inner determination, from a supreme reason; whereby we in part cognize the constitution belonging to it (the world) itself, without presuming to want to determine in itself the constitution of the cause of the world, and, on the other hand, we in part posit the basis of this constitution (the rational form of the world) in the relation of the highest cause to the world, not finding the world by itself sufficient thereto (Kant 113, emphasis in original).
Karl Barth’s theology rests heavily on revelation. For Barth, God is “wholly other” and impossible to know by human beings—unless God reveals Himself to human beings Himself, which is what He does. As Kant holds that humans cannot reach upwards to God because of the phenomenal/noumenal distinction, Barth holds that humans cannot reach upwards to God because of His infinite nature. But Barth couples the impossibility of a human reaching-upward with the event encompassed by Jesus of God’s reaching-downward. In Kantian language, God comes into the phenomenal world to impart truths of Himself to us.
James Kincade, in his article in the Journal of Religion, describes the similarities between Kant and Barth. He notes that Barth himself takes on a kind of “Copernican revolution,” but instead of placing our minds at the center he places Christ there. The theology of the time had been attempting to make religion palatable to the human mind, as Schleiermacher and others had done. Barth, like Kant, turned the whole system upside down, demanding that the human mind make itself compatible with God’s revelation. This revelation, according to Barth, is independent of us (or our experience as such). “It is God’s search for man which is important—not man’s search for God,” writes Kincade (Kincade 167).
Like Kant, Barth wholeheartedly rejects natural theology (Fackre 5). It is impossible to reason from experience to God in Himself. Here Barth is still within the Kantian system. However, instead of closing the book on the matter, Barth instead explains that God has Himself decided to reveal knowledge of Himself as He is to humanity. “The act of self-disclosedness in Jesus Christ is an expression of the character of God as intrinsically self-disclosive. . . While there are reaches of mystery in the divine being, God does not tell us ‘one thing in history while being something else in eternity. His secondary [or phenomenal, in this case] objectivity is fully true, for it has its correspondence and basis in His primary [or noumenal] objectivity’” (Fackre, partially quoting Barth, 5).
Does this work? Can the noumenal disclose itself to the phenomenal, or does it forever remain outside of it? Kant, by his own admission, begins with a deistic conception of God and adds predicates to it. Kant writes, “For if one only grants us, at the beginning, the deistic concept of a first being as a necessary hypothesis . . . then nothing can keep us from predicating of this being a causality through reason with respect to the world, and thus from crossing over to theism” (Kant112). This conception, almost assuredly chosen in order to respond to Hume’s arguments against theism, cuts off God’s real activity within the bounds of the world of experience. God is forever outside and never within, only acting through the intermediary of reason. God-in-Godself is never present, and we only learn of God by analogy through reason.
In Barth’s view, however, the full revelation of God-in-Himself occurs in the incarnation of Jesus, who is God in the flesh. God here takes a full and active role in the world of experience. If we are justified in believing or knowing about other human beings in the phenomenal world, we are also justified in affirming God’s existence. While it does not solve the problem of knowing anything about God-in-Godself, since even other human interactions are “filtered” through the phenomenal, we do not transgress the bounds of reason by drawing conclusions about God or God’s nature. By having God exist for a time fully in the world of experience, Kant’s tension between the unknowability of God as pure reason and the practical desire for and necessity of God’s existence are solved. This is, in a way, Barth’s solution to this Kantian antinomy.
This approach may seem odd, and perhaps alien to what Kant’s concerns were, but if we examine the concepts in play we see that Barth’s idea of revelation can actually quite easily and naturally respond to Kant’s claims. Kant says that God-in-Godself is essentially unknowable. Though humans desire to posit God as a unificatory principle for their knowledge, experiential knowledge of a being which exists outside of the world of experience (i.e. as pure reason or soul) is impossible. Barth would respond by denying that God exclusively exists outside the world of experience. By coming into the world within a body, God gives the same justification for claims of His existence as claims of other people we encounter or read about. It is a short step from claiming the incarnation and trustworthiness of Jesus, who vouches for the rest of the written revelation of God, to build Christianity within the bounds of reason.
Works Cited
Fackre, Gabriel. "Revelation." Karl Barth and Evangelical Theology: Convergences and Divergences. Ed. Sung Wook Chung. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006. Print.
Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print.
Kincade, James. "Karl Barth and Philosophy." Journal of Relgion. 40.3 (1960): 161-169. Print.
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