Chapter X

Reason’s Birth in Immediate Experience

 

 

The sum of all these contemplations leads us to a conception of the Supreme Being which, when men made of dust venture to look be­yond the curtain that conceals from created eyes the mysteries of the Inscrutable, comprehends in itself every thing possible to be thought. God is all-sufficient. What exists, whether it be possible or actual, is but something, so far as it is given by Him. A human language may let the Infinite speak to himself thus, I am from eternity to eternity, besides me there is nothing, something is but so far as it is through me. This thought, the most sublime of any is yet much neglected ... [Kt15:151(349)].

 

1. Mysticism and Religious Experience

       Chapter II examined the Critical character of Kt18 and its role in preparing the way for Kant’s Critical System. I argued that, far from being a ‘pre-Criti­cal’ work, Kt18 contains all the essential ingredients of the Critical method and that the only key element of Kant’s mature thinking that is alto­gether missing, namely the famous ‘Copernican’ insight, is actually present in the works of Swedenborg, whose views Kant was critiquing in Kt18. I also suggested, but left undeveloped, the idea that Kant himself did not have an entirely negative opinion of mysticism, but rather hoped through his Critical phi­losophy to pro­vide a secure foundation not only for metaphysics, but for mys­ticism as well. The purpose of Part Four will be to defend this idea more thor­oughly by demonstrating the extent to which a mystical world view can be seen operating throughout Kant’s philosophical writings, but especially in those composing the System itself [see KSP1:III.4]. I will begin in this section by distinguishing between several types of mystic, based on the type of religious experience regarded as ‘mystical’. The next section will examine more thoroughly Kant’s reasons for rejecting what he calls ‘fanatical’ mysticism. X.3 will then demon­strate that Kant himself develops a special Critical type of mysticism. And X.4 will conclude this chapter by examining various factors that shaped this world view, especially the systematic relationship between four of his favorite medi­tative metaphors. The final two chapters in this volume will then show how Critical mys­ticism served as a cru­cial motivating factor in Kant’s last few years of life (especially while writing Kt9), to the extent that the ultimate ‘need of reason’ is paradoxi­cally fulfilled by the mystical ‘death’ of reason itself.

       A good general definition of mysticism is suggested by Albert Schweitzer’s description of the mystic as ‘a human being looking upon the di­vision between earthly and super-earthly, temporal and eternal, as transcended, and feeling himself, while still externally amid the earthly and temporal, to be­long to the super-earthly and eternal.’[1] From this at least three sorts of mysticism can be inferred, depending on how a person believes contact with the eternal can be established. First, the mystic might believe membership in a ‘super-earthly’ realm makes it possible to communicate with other spirits, especially those that are no longer tied to a body. This is the type of mysticism practiced by Swedenborg and condemned by Kant in Kt18. Since we dealt with it fully in Chapter II, there is no need to consider it any further here.

       Another, more common alternative is for mystics to participate in some organized religion, seeking to express their eternal nature through traditional beliefs and rituals. This is indeed so common that such participants in organized religion usually do not think of themselves as mystics. As we saw in Part Three, Kant’s Copernican Perspective on religion allows for the potential validity of this second sense of mysticism, whereby contact with the eternal is channeled through religious activities and beliefs. Kant’s Critical religion condones such religious/mystical experience, based on the judicial standpoint, provided it promotes a rational (moral) discipline by clothing a pure religious disposition with good actions, thus ren­dering practitioners worthy of receiving God’s grace. However, mystics (as well as many ordinary religious people who would not presume to adorn themselves with such a title) more often speak of mystical experience in a rather different way.

       The term ‘mysticism’ can be used to refer not to the reflective act of pleas­ing God through the overcoming of one’s evil heart, as expressed in the moral actions of a group of believers banded together to form a church, but to a more direct form of communication or communion with a personal God. Mystical experience of this type usually takes place outside the bounds of organized religion. The suggestion that Kant admitted the validity of such immediate and personal religious experience, and encouraged its promotion as an important aspect of his System, is (if entertained at all) almost universally denied by his inter­preters. Nevertheless, my purpose here in Part Four will be to demonstrate that such a mystical feeling lies at the very heart of the Critical philosophy: it is as important to the System as birth and death are to an individual person, for it sets up the limits and in so doing establishes for the System its ultimate mean­ing.

       Webb calls attention to the traditional view that philosophy is ‘the daughter of Religion, and starts upon her career with an outfit of questions suggested by religious experience’ [We26:14]. The term ‘religious experience’ here re­fers not to a communion with disembodied spirits, nor to the experience of God in humanly organized religion; rather, it is an immediate personal encounter fitting the description of the third type of mysticism introduced above. Kant’s Criti­cal philosophy, I maintain, follows the tradition Webb cites. For as we have seen, his entire System of Perspectives has a clear religious and theological orientation, despite the failure of many commentators to recognize its presence. The task of validating the primarily theological ideas of God, freedom, and immortality unites the three Critiques; indeed, Kant believes his approach to these and other topics of religious and theological interest, though entirely philosophical in its presentation, can provide the only legitimate rational basis for religion [s.e. Chs. IV and VII]. Furthermore, as we saw in II.2-4, the last book he wrote before setting out on the path of constructing his System of Critical philosophy [viz., Kt18] sets before him the question of how the philosopher is to cope with the claims of mystics such as Swedenborg; and as we shall see in Chapters XI and XII, the uncompleted book intended to fill the final gap in his System [viz., Kt9] provides ample evidence that the ultimate aim of the entire Critical enterprise is to replace the extreme mysti­cal and anti-mystical attitudes with a balanced approach that can best be called ‘Critical mysticism’. Before turning to Kt9, let us examine in X.2-4 the extent to which Kant’s other works reveal such a balanced mystical spirit.

 

2. Kant’s Apparent Rejection of Mysticism

       The conventional interpretation of Kant portrays him as consistently deny­ing, or at least ignoring, any ‘possibility of an encounter with the transcendent’ [Sm69:5.62] and adds that ‘he seems to have found the notion of an immanent God unfamiliar and uncongenial to his mind’ [We26:50]. Baelz expresses this view in its classic form in Ba68:41:

 

Kant, while recognizing the demands of the moral law inherent in man’s own ra­tional being, had no room for any immediate apprehension of God, belief in whom was a postulate and no more than a postulate, inferential rather than direct, medi­ated by reason rather than immediately given in experience.

 

Even those who recognize that Kant’s view of religion in Kt8 is ‘not radically unlike the traditional Christian view’ [Wa72:168] generally agree that ‘any sense of per­sonal fellowship with God, revelation from God or redemption by God is en­tirely lacking in the Kantian scheme.’ With this assumption in hand, inter­preters often treat any reference to experience of God in general or ‘mysticism’ in particular as a condemnation, regardless of what Kant actually says. Thus, for example, Temple claims [Te94:111] that in Kt35:9 Kant rejects Plato’s idea of ‘communion with the highest being’ as being ‘mystical’ and ‘visionary’; yet a careful look at the text reveals that Kant does nothing but describe this notion. He neither argues against it nor passes judgment on it [s.a. Kt1:371n].

       We have already seen in Part Three that such claims are too harsh: Kant is always careful to leave a space for God’s ac­tivity in relation to mankind and for faith in relation to knowledge [s.a. KSP1:V]; what he criticizes is only the at­tempt to grasp or control God in such a way as to force revelation or redemp­tion to occur (as indeed Plato seems to have done). Thus Baillie, rejecting the standard interpretation, sees in Kant ‘the glim­mer of a notion of faith as a “direct interior persuasion” in matters of reli­gious truth’ [q.i. Wi80:530-1; cf. Ba39: 130-1,161,257]. The recognition that Kant’s philosophy is a Sys­tem of Per­spectives can, I believe, transform this ‘glimmer’ into an unmis­tak­able ray of noon-day sunlight. It may even enable us to defend Du Prel’s sug­gestion that ‘the Kantian “Critique of Reason”’ points directly to mysticism [Du89:1.xxvi].

       The belief that Kant disallows any direct experience of God stems from two misunderstandings that arise only when his dependence on the principle of perspective is ignored. The first arises out of the failure to make the impor­tant distinction between mediate experience (i.e., empirical knowledge), and immediate experience [see KSP1:IV.1]. The fact that ‘the glimpses [of ‘the infinity in the finite and the universality in the individual’] are distrusted’ by Kant [Wa01:218] is taken by most interpreters as a distrust in immediate experience, when in fact Kant’s expression of distrust in such ‘glimpses’ always relates to their inadequacy when viewed from reason’s theoretical standpoint, the standpoint that aims at and depends on empirical knowledge. If such glimpses are viewed as immediate experiences, and therefore not reflected upon, then there is no question of distrusting them, because no Critical stand­point is adopted from which such distrust can arise.

       The second misunderstanding arises out of the failure to recognize that Kant does not regard the Copernican Perspective as one that must be adopted at all times. Only when a person chooses to reflect rationally on experience would Kant argue that the Copernican Perspective should be adopted. By no means does such reflection entail a denial that people do have nonreflective (immediate) ex­perience as well. Thus, when Kant makes statements such as ‘The philosopher, as a teacher of pure reason ... must waive consideration of all experience’ [Kt8: 12(11)], he is not calling into question the reality or validity of such (immediate) experience, but only reminding us to distinguish between the a priori and a posteriori. Likewise, his unwillingness to allow an immediate encounter with God to serve as an element anywhere in his System does not indi­cate that he views such an encounter as impossible, but only that he recognizes that it does not occur by means of reflection. Kant’s strategy of explaining re­ligious doc­trines and activities in practical (moral) terms must not, therefore, be regarded as a denial of the legitimacy of an immediate experience of the eternal. His point, rather, is that, insofar as one wishes to explain such experiences, a practical explanation always takes precedence over a theoretical explanation.

       Affirming that we have immediate (and hence nonreflective) experience is not problematic; but asserting that God is actually present in such experience does seem to go directly against Kant’s own claims to the contrary. ‘A direct revelation from God’, he says in Kt65:47, ‘would be a supersensible experi­ence, and this is impossible.’ For ‘a supernatural experience ... is a contradic­tion in terms’ [57]; indeed, ‘supersensible experience ... is absurd’ [Kt23:401n (180n)]. Before we jump to any conclusions concerning the impli­cations of such negative statements, it is important to determine just what Kant means by the words ‘supersensible [or ‘supernatural’] experience’. Is he declaring that an immediate, nonreflective encounter between a human being and God is so absurd an idea as to be an impossible contradiction, or is he only rejecting the supposition that such an encounter can give rise to real empirical knowledge of God (i.e., from the theoretical standpoint of systemt)? Since most inter­preters fail to distinguish between immediate experience and experience in Kant’s special, mediate sense, this question is rarely even asked. Once we make this distinction, however, it seems clear that Kant is referring to experi­ence as empirical knowledge whenever he rejects the possibility of supersensi­ble experience. Immediate experience just is; so words like ‘contradiction’ do not really even apply to it. Moreover, Kant himself, as we have seen in II.2, is actu­ally open to the possibility of mystical visions in Kt18; and as we shall see in XII.2, he even affirms an immediate experience of God in Kt9. He would therefore be blatantly contradicting himself if he were to claim elsewhere that such ineffable experiences are actually absurd. By contrast, a claim to theoreti­cal knowledge of the transcendent (i.e., supernatu­ral) ground of the empirical world clearly would be absurd and contradictory, inasmuch as the presupposi­tion of Kant’s entire System is that the transcendent ground (the thing in itself) is unknowable [see KSP1:V.2 and AV.1-4].

       The purely theoretical intention of Kant’s various denials of supersensible experience is substantiated by examining the context of such comments. For he never denies altogether that such experiences are legitimate, but only requires that we change the standpoint from which we view them. In Kt65:57-8 Kant is considering whether the ‘claim that we feel as such the immediate influence of God’ can be used as ‘an interpretation of certain sensations’ in order to prove that ‘they are elements in knowledge and so have real [theoretical] objects’. He concludes that ‘we can never make anything rational out of’ such an attempted theoretical proof. He admits such subjective experiences are genuine, but in­sists they remain mysterious.[2] Thus he explains in Kt65:47 that the ex­perience of divine supernatural power ‘comes to man through his own reason’; it is not a ‘direct revelation’ in the sense of coming in the form of a sensible experience that is objectively verifiable. (Otherwise, a person watching someone who is experiencing, for example, an apparition of the Blessed Virgin would also be able to see the object just as clearly.) ‘The inter­nal experience [e.g., of the mystic], and the feeling (which is in itself empirical ...), are incited by the voice of reason only’; yet such feeling does not consti­tute ‘a particular rule for reason ..., which is impossible’ [Kt23:402(181)]. Here again Kant is explicitly con­sidering whether or not such a feeling suffices for a theoretical proof: if it could give rise to a ‘rule for reason’ (i.e., for every­one’s reason), then it would be objective, and could qualify as a supersensible experience in systemt.

       Kant’s point is that all such feelings arising out of our immediate experience will remain subjective;[3] but the certainty re­sulting from them is not for this reason any less valid [see e.g., Kt1:857]. Thus, he says ‘there is no theoretical belief in the supersensible’; yet ‘from a morally practical standpoint a belief     in the supersensible is not only possible, but it is even inseparably conjoined with it [i.e., with the practical standpoint]’ [Kt23:397n(174n)]. So when Kant says the ‘feeling of the immediate presence of the Supreme Being and the distinguishing of this from every other, even from the moral feeling, would constitute a receptivity for an intuition for which there is no sensory provision in man’s nature’ [Kt8:175(163), e.a.], he is not denying that such a feeling can legitimately be experienced, as Ward claims [Wa72:157], nor is he altogether ruling out ‘the mystic’s intuition’ as a way of experiencing, as Schrader claims [Sc51a:240], but is only insisting that such an experience cannot properly be viewed from the the­oretical standpoint. Likewise, when criticizing the excesses of the ‘philosophy of feeling’, in its attempt to go ‘directly to the point itself’, without ‘reasoning from conceptions’ [Kt23:395(171-2)], Kant admits that ‘philosophy has its secrets which may be felt’. The mistake is to think such feelings can be interpreted in such a way as to replace reason. This accords well with the mystic’s recognition that what is appre­hend­ed in a mystical experience remains ultimately mysterious—i.e., it is something whose true nature can­not be apprehended sensibly. Indeed, this very fact that we cannot have a sensible experience of the transcendent as it is in it­self—i.e., one that produces theoretical knowledge—is what gives rise to the need for a mystical ex­perience that cannot fit properly into any Critical per­spective.

       Unfortunately, Kant’s conception of mysticism is rather narrow. He equates ‘mystical’ with ‘magical’ in Kt8:120(111) and comments elsewhere on ‘the mystical fanaticism in the lives of hermits and monks’ [130(121)]. He refers to the ‘mystical veil’ [83(78)] in such a way as to indicate that for him mysticism implies confusion or lack of clarity. Thus he claims in Kt23:398 (175) that mystics seek to establish ‘an overlap ... from conceptions to the incogitable’ by means of ‘a faculty to seize that which no conception reaches’. Such efforts usually indicate ‘a bent towards fanaticism’: because such mystical operations are ‘transcendent and can lead to no proper cognition of the object, a surrogate of it, supernatural communication (mystical illumina­tion), must be promised; which is then the death of all philosophy.’ Elsewhere, Kant argues that ‘the speculative man becomes en­tangled in mysticism where his reason does not understand itself’, a situation that is not ‘fitting for an intellectual inhabitant of a sensible world’ [Kt31:335-6]. (The ex­ample he cites is that ‘Chinese philosophers strive in dark rooms with eyes closed to experience and contemplate their nihility.’) Mystical experiences as such can hardly be called speculation in Kant’s theoretical sense, yet he be­lieves they are subject to the same criticism, because the pantheism on which he believes such practices are based ‘is really a concept in company with which their understanding disinte­grates and all thinking itself comes to an end.’[4] 

       Kant’s official criticism of mysticism is that it errs only when it gives rise to fanaticism—i.e., only when the attempt at ‘communion with God’ is be­lieved to ‘accomplish [some]thing in the way of justifying ourselves before God’.[5] However, mystics do not have to be fa­natics of this sort—indeed, they often are not. Thus, in Kt4:70-1 Kant defines mysticism as taking what can ‘only serve as a symbol to be a schema’—thus implying that there may be a proper (symbolic, noncognitive) interpretation of mystical experiences. In Kt65:46 Kant explains that mysticism in the form of fanatical fantasy that ‘inevitably gets lost in the transcendent’ can be avoided by establishing for it an ethical grounding [cf. note X.1]: philosophers should ‘be on the lookout for a moral meaning in scriptural texts and even ... impose it on them’, because ‘unless the supersen­sible (the thought of which is essential to anything called religion) is anchored to determinate concepts of reason, such as those of morality, ... there is no longer any public touchstone of truth.’ So ‘mysticism, with its lamp of private revelations’ [65] is not illegitimate in itself, but only when it fails to subject it­self to the objective principles of practical reason, as expressed, for example, in the Bible.[6]

       Like everything Kant subjects to his Critical method, mysticism is rejected only in its extreme form (e.g., as ‘enthusiasm’), but is allowed to remain in a more moderate (‘Critical’) form. Kant implies as much when he says some of Plato’s tendencies ‘may be too mystical’ [Kt57:240(53), e.a.]. He makes this point more explicitly in the passage already quoted in IX.3.B:

 

And so, between orthodoxy which has no soul and mysticism which kills reason, there is the teaching of the Bible, a faith which our reason can develop out of it­self. This teaching is the true religious doctrine, based on the criticism of practical reason, that works with divine power on all men’s hearts ... [Kt65:59].

 

The three words Kant emphasizes in this passage suggest his real aim is to defend, in accordance with the real aim of the biblical message, not only a kind of Critical orthodoxy (as we saw in Part Three), but also a Critical mysticism. Thus, although Kant criticizes the belief that we can ‘by any token, recognize a supersensible object in experience’, he readily admits that ‘at times there do arise stirrings of the heart making for morality’ [Kt8:174(162)]. As a support for the moral life, Kant not only sanctions the attention a mystic pays to such ‘stirrings’, but, as we shall see, he actively nurtures them in his own life. Indeed, whereas fanatical mysticism leads to ‘the moral death of rea­son’ [175 (163)], Kant’s Critical mysticism begins as a simple acknowledgment of the immediate experiences that engender the moral birth of reason.

       Most mystics, in fact, regard the revitalization of everyday life as the end result of an authentic mystical journey [see e.g., Co74:82]. For the mystical experience is not generally one of confusion or uncertainty, as is so often wrongly assumed [see e.g., note X.6], but one of utmost clarity and im­mediate certainty. We shall see in Chapters XI-XII that Kant’s own attitude to­wards God in Kt9 reflects this same sense of inexpressible clarity and immedi­ate certainty. More­over, just as mystics (contrary to Kant’s opinion) do not try to grasp God (or even their own ‘nihility’ in many cases) but to open them­selves up to be grasped by the tran­scendent Ground of Being, so also Kant portrays the voice of God, speaking through the moral law within, not as a way of controlling God, but as a way of recognizing and receiv­ing God’s word immediately and thereby applying it to one’s everyday actions.

       Kant reveals that he is not entirely antipathetic towards mysticism by ap­pending to his discussion of theology and religion in Kt65 a lengthy letter wherein a young student named Wilmans summarizes the content of the Critical philosophy.[7] Kant warns that ‘I do not mean to guarantee that my views coincide entirely with his’ [69n]; but the title Kant gives to this Appendix (‘On a Pure Mysticism of Reason’) suggests his main reason for including this letter is to encourage the reader to flirt with the enticing claim Wilmans makes at the end, that genuine Christian mysticism is entirely consistent with, and perhaps even implied by, the Critical philosophy [s.a. Ha96:48]. (If Kant had objected to this claim, he could easily have omitted this last portion of the letter.) Wilmans’ argument begins at the point in the letter where he concludes his summary and first addresses Kant [74-5]; it is worth quoting at length:

 

I had reached this point in my study of your writings ... when I became acquainted with a group of people, called separatists but calling themselves mystics, among whom I found your teachings put into practice almost verbatim. It was indeed diffi­cult to recognize your teachings, at first, in their mystical terms, but after persis­tent probing I succeeded. It struck me as strange that these people ... repudiate all ‘divine service’ that does not consist in fulfilling one’s duties: that they consider themselves religious people and indeed Christians, though they take as their code not the Bible, but only the precepts of an inward Christianity dwelling in us from eternity. I inquired into their conduct and found in them (except for the mangy sheep that, from self-interest, get into every flock) a pure moral attitude of will ... I ex­amined their teachings and principles and recognized the essentials of your entire moral and religious doctrine ...: ... they consider the inner law, as they call it, an inward revelation and so regard God as definitely its author. It is true that they re­gard the Bible as a book which in some way or other—they do not discuss it fur­ther—is of divine origin; but, ... they infer the divine origin of the Bible from the consistency of the doctrine it contains with their inner law. For if one asks their reason, they reply: The Bible is validated in my heart, as you will find it in yours if you obey the precepts of your inner law or the teachings of the Bible. For the same reason they do not regard the Bible as their code of laws but only as a histori­cal confirmation in which they recognize what is originally grounded in them­selves. In a word, if these people were philosophers they would be (pardon the term!) true Kantians.... Among the educated members I have never encountered fa­naticism, but rather free, unprejudiced reasoning and judgment in religious matters.

 

       If Kant really intends to promote such a Critical mysticism, then we would expect to find some evidence of a mystical tendency both in his own life and in his philosophical writings. Although it is rarely taken at face value, there is actually ample evidence of such a tendency in both areas. In Kt4:71, for example, Kant openly favors mysticism in comparison to empiricism: ‘mystic­ism is compatible with the purity and sublimity of the moral law’, even though it improperly ‘plunges into the transcendent’ when fanatics believe they have a capacity for ‘nonsensuous intuitions’. By contrast, ‘empiricism is far more dangerous than all mystical enthusiasm’, for it ‘uproots the morality of intentions’. With this tantalizing foretaste, let us therefore consider now some of the evidence that could be used to support Wilmans’ astute observations.

 

3. Kant’s Disclosure of Critical Mysticism

       As shown in IV.4 and AIV.1-3, Kant bases his belief in God not on theo­retical proof, but on an existential ‘conviction that dawns most spontaneously in all minds’ [Pe72:64]. We are now in a position to consider to what extent this conviction exhibits the sort of immediate certainty of the transcendent claimed by mys­tics. As Norburn puts it in No73:432: ‘Kant him­self never doubted the existence of a Supreme Being ... He claimed that our awareness of God came by another route, a route not open (like logic) to the clever devil.’ Moreover, Kant sometimes uses phrases that imply some sort of communica­tive relationship be­tween God and man (such as ‘God tells us’ [e.g., Kt35:(98); s.a. Kt65:67]), as does his belief that duties can be regarded from the religious stand­point as divine commands.[8] For instance, he says in Kt6:491 that ‘the sort of moral relation that holds ... between God and man surpasses com­pletely the boundaries of ethics and is altogether inconceivable to us.’ Ward somehow con­strues this to mean God and human beings are not related [Wa72:158]; yet Kant’s point surely is that a relation holds between God and mankind, even though the na­ture of such a relation is ‘inconceivable’ from the theoretical standpoint.

       Kant’s favorite idiom for expressing the relation between human beings and God, an idiom he employs on numerous occasions in his later writings, is that of the ‘voice of God’ speaking to human beings through their common participation in practical reason [see note X.8]. The question as to how this ‘voice’ is experi­enced—i.e., as an inner feeling, as an audible voice, or even as accompanying an apparition—is not important, as long as the person who ex­periences it rec­ognizes that it comes not as a direct (i.e., theoretical) communi­cation, but indi­rectly, through the mediation of our ‘morally legislative reason’ [see Kt1:847, q.i. IV.4]. To let our activity be guided by this mysterious, in­wardly impelling force or spirit is to let ourselves be guided by God. Knowing that God’s voice comes to us through the mediation of practical reason provides us with a negative principle for assessing alleged mystical experiences:

 

For if God should really speak to man, man could still never know that it was God speaking [i.e., the voice does not convey theoretical knowledge]. It is quite impos­sible for man to apprehend the infinite by his senses, distinguish it from sensible beings, and recognize it as such. But in some cases man can be sure that the voice he hears is not God’s; for if the voice commands him to do something contrary to the moral law, then no matter how majestic the apparition may be ... he must con­sider it an illusion. [Kt65:63]

 

Kant draws attention away from the theoretical and towards the practical, as usual, in order to guard against fanaticism. But his references to this ‘voice’ are by no means entirely negative. On the contrary, he associates it with a specific judicial faculty of the mind, the ‘conscience’.

       Kant describes conscience in Kt39:495(215) as ‘the representa­tive of God, who has His lofty seat above us, but who has also established a tribunal in us.’ That it is a judicial faculty is evident from the fact that Kant describes it as ‘a third thing’ mediating between ‘the moral judgment and the moral law’ [Kt35:(69)]. ‘Conscience is a state of consciousness which in itself is duty [cf. stage three of systemp].... [It] is the moral faculty of judgment, passing judg­ment upon itself’ [Kt8:185-6(173-4)]. Through this ‘consciousness of an inter­nal court in man’ [Kt6:438; s.a. 400-1], God is revealed to be both tran­scendent (‘above us’) and immanent (‘in us’) [cf. V.1-2]. Kant does not identi­fy our conscience with God; rather ‘conscience must be thought of as the sub­jective principle of being accountable to God for all one’s deeds’ [439], for ‘I, the prosecutor and yet the accused as well, am the same man’ [439n]. God, as the third person in the Trinity, is ‘the real Judge of men (at the bar of con­science)’ [Kt8:145n(136n)]: ‘the Judge of men ... (the Holy Ghost) ... speaks to our conscience according to the holy law which we know’ [140n(131n)]. ‘The judge within us is just’ [Kt35:(67)], therefore, because it is conscience com­manding on God’s behalf in accordance with the moral law.

       This experience of the voice of God can always be trusted as a person’s ‘guide’ [Kt8:185(173)]; the problem is to be certain that the voice one appeals to for guidance really has its source in the conscience: ‘an erring conscience is a nonentity; ... I may err ... in the judgment, in which I believe to be in the right: for that belongs to the understanding ...; but in the consciousness, Whether in fact I believe to be in the right (or merely pretend it), I absolutely cannot err’ [Kt64:268(210)]. It is potentially misleading, however, to interpret Kant as saying that ‘God’s will cannot be ... ascertained otherwise than through our conscience’ [We26:86]; for Kant does not mean that we cannot learn of God’s will in any other way, but only that whatever the outward form (e.g., a passage from Scripture, a sermon, or even an apparition), the validation that it is from God occurs when the message touches our conscience. If a message touches the depths of our being (i.e., our practical reason via the conscience), we can be sure it is from God. In proposing this view, Kant is not freeing individ­uals to follow the whims of their desires so long as they convince themselves not to feel guilty. That would be to ignore the voice of conscience. Rather, the ultimate goal of all reflection—and so also of doing philosophy—is to learn how to distinguish properly the voice of God from the impure incentives that speak against the moral law. Along these lines Kant says in Kt31:336 that ‘practical wisdom ... abides alone with God. And to respond to this Idea, by not obviously acting against it, is what we might perhaps call human wisdom.’

       Kant’s theory of the individual conscience as God’s means of judging individuals is entirely consistent with Jesus’ teaching about judgment in the Sermon on the Mount. Both insist ‘it is impossible to judge the virtue of others from their actions; that Judge, who looks into all hearts, has reserved that judgement for Himself.’[9] Along these lines Kant criticizes the tendency of some clergy to impose their own conscience upon the laity; such a ‘forcing of conscience’ can ‘forbid thought itself and really hinder it’, especially when it assumes that doubting theoretical doctrines is ‘tantamount to lending an ear to the evil spirits’ [Kt8:133-4n(124n)]. For a person can become aware of ‘the verdict of his future judge’ not by examining the correctness of various theoretical beliefs, but only by considering ‘his awakening conscience, together with the empirical knowledge of himself [i.e., of the motives of his actions] which is summoned to its aid’ [77(71)]. This implies that God judges us on the basis of the judgment of our own conscience, a view that seems also to be implied by Jesus’ proclamation that ‘in the way you judge [yourself and others], you will be judged [by God]; and by your standard of measure, it shall be measured to you’ [Matt. 7:2]. In any case, Kant’s understanding of the role of con­science provides significant evidence that his concern is not only with ‘the rational “form” for the decision-making procedure that a Christian would fol­low, anyway, ... if he acted fully in accordance with Jesus’ teachings’ [Th70:195]—a description that does accurately describe the purpose of sys­temp—but also with the existential experience of the divine-human encounter.

       Further evidence of Kant’s concern for understanding the experience of a human encounter with the divine can be gleaned from his description of ‘devoutness’ as ‘an indirect relation of the heart to God’ [Kt35:(89)]. This theme has already been discussed at length in VIII.3.B [s.a. AVII.4]. Here it will suffice to recall Kant’s view of devotion as a way of preparing oneself to act, rather than as a way of manipulating God. This is precisely the emphasis mystics usually put on spiritual exercises such as meditation, prayer, and fasting. Most mystics use such disciplines not to grasp God, nor to render themselves well-pleasing to God, but to open themselves up to the immediate presence of God, so that the ordinary actions of their everyday life become imbued with divine energy. Kant’s approval of such Critical mysticism comes to the fore when, as shown in Appendix VIII, he portrays true prayer as that wherein God’s ‘all-seeing eye penetrates into our innermost souls and reads our thoughts’ [Kt35:(98)] and as a discipline that should thereby ‘fan into flames the cinders of morality in the inner recesses of our heart’ [(99)].

       The traditional view, that ‘a private relation to God ... is in Kant’s eyes incompatible with sound morality and sane reason’ [We26:155-6], is therefore based on a mistaken interpretation of Kant’s criticism. Kant encourages a pri­vate relation between God and individual persons through a mutual participa­tion in practical reason; he objects only to the supposition of a public (theoretically verifiable) relation based on a supposed intuition of God.[10] In other words, he accepts the importance of ‘mystery, i.e., something holy which may indeed be known by each single individual but cannot be made known publicly’, as long as we understand that ‘it must be moral’ and ‘not for theoretical use’ [Kt8:137 (129)]. Thus, when he criticizes ‘the tendency of prayer to turn God, the prop­er object of faith, into an object of intuition’ [Wa72:63; see Kt35:(115)], he is not arguing that any attempt at ‘fellowship with [God]’ is ‘imaginary’ [Wa72: 62; s.a. We26:155], but that our experience of such fellow­ship (being in itself nei­ther practical nor theoretical, but immediate) can be ade­quately explained as be­ing rooted only in our practical reason. Far from deny­ing the validity of a fellowship based on practical faith, Kant actually defends its sufficiency: ‘We do not know God by intuition but by faith.... Now faith is undoubtedly no less vigorous a faculty than intuition’ [Kt35:(114-5); s.a. Kt8:52(48)].

       A criticism frequently leveled against Kant is well-expressed by Otto: ‘It is one thing merely to believe in a reality beyond the senses and an­other to have experience of it also; it is one thing to have ideas of “the holy” and another to become consciously aware of it as an operative reality, intervening actively in the phenomenal world.’[11] Webb applies this criticism directly to Kant in We26:22: ‘With Science and with Morality one feels that Kant was complete­ly at home ... With Aesthetics, and with Religion ... the case is otherwise. The circumstances of his life denied Kant any extensive experience of visible beauty, whether natural or wrought by art.’ He adds that, in spite of his ‘congenital incapacity for much that is most characteristically religious’, Kant’s philosophy of religion ‘is epoch-making in theology’ [24; s.a. 60]. And Hedge affirms a view of Kant as a man without much personal experience of life when he remarks [He49:58]: ‘no sage ever lived’ who was ‘more purely secluded within himself’.

       Such judgments appear to be supported by the well known biographical details of Kant’s life: the fact that he never strayed more than ten or twenty miles from his birthplace in Königsberg;[12] his rigidly structured daily sched­ule, so ‘mechanically regular’ [He49:58] that his neighbors sup­posedly set their clocks by his daily comings and goings;[13] and his lack of church attendance [see e.g., Kl52:38,43; s.a. note X.15]. Yet none of these traits makes a ‘philistine’, as Heine claims [He59:111,270; cf. Kt7:229]. On the contrary, many mystics would say travel only makes it more difficult to maintain the mystical center of one’s experience (i.e., one’s ‘home’). Surely one does not have to view natural wonders such as the Grand Canyon or Mount Everest in order to appreciate God’s pres­ence in a flower: the most ordinary landscape is quite capable of evoking a deep (mystical) response from a person who is intimately familiar with it. And it is typically not the philistine but the mystic who lives in a highly disciplined, apparently self-enclosed way; for a self-disciplined life provides the proper context for discerning the voice of God in the midst of the ambient noise of one’s own inclinations.[14] Moreover, it seems extraordinarily odd to assume that someone who is capable of expounding the heart of the Christian message, as Kant did so profoundly in Kt8, was himself uninterested in (to say nothing of congenitally incapable of!) religious experience as such.

       If we ignore the well known caricatures of Kant [see IV.1] and consider the facts carefully and with an open mind, there turns out to be ample evidence that he not only believed in the reality of the transcendent God represented by our theoretical idea, manifested in our practical reason (speak­ing to our con­science), and communing with us in prayer, but also actively experienced this reality in his daily life. Webb admits ‘there is no doubt that Kant could ... have given in all sincerity an affirmative reply to the question’: ‘Whether he feared God from his heart’ [We26:28]. Manolesco portrays Kant as ‘a religious man’ who ‘knew the voice of God in the depth of his conscience’ [Ma69:28; s.a. De73:18,111-2,267]. Loades [Lo81:299] says Kant’s ‘life’s work [was] com­pleted in homage to the deity.’ And Rabel supports this view with a story:

 

Kant was a profoundly religious man.... When Kant had discovered that in a bad summer swallows threw some of their own young out of the nest in order to keep the others alive, he said: ‘My intelligence stood still. There was nothing to do but to fall on one’s knees and worship.’[15]

 

To a nonmystical person, out of touch with the voice of God, the observation that swallows had sacrificed their own young would be more likely to evoke con­fusion or disgust with the senseless misfortunes of nature than an attitude of worship. Yet for Kant, who believed we should al­ways try ‘to discover the good in evil’ [Kt39:495(216)], it evoked an over­whelming sense of divine Providence [see AVI.1 and Kt46:431(95)]. Notably, it evoked this response of fearful respect for God precisely because he was un­able to understand it: reason rests in the face of immediate experience; yet this rest is first experienced not as a death but as a new birth, provided reason submits itself to a higher power. This is the Perspective affirmed by Critical mysticism.

       The twofold aspect of Kant’s mystical world-view is expressed most clearly by his famous exclamation in Kt4:161-2, e.a.:

 

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not merely conjecture them and seek them as though obscured in darkness or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon: I see them before me, and I associate them directly with the consciousness of my own existence.

 

Such a statement could only be made by a person who had spent long hours meditating on the hand of God in nature and on the voice of God in conscience. The starry heavens and the moral law obviously symbolize for Kant the unknowable mysteries (or noumenal Mystery) that undergird(s) systemt and systemp, respectively. For what ‘fills the mind with awe’ is not empirical knowledge of the stars or of moral activity as such, but rather a meditative obser­vation of how these wonders operate in our immediate experience.

       Is there a third object of meditation corresponding to systemj? This is a debatable question. A negative answer is suggested by the fact that systemj is con­cerned not with knowledge, but with feelings. ‘Feelings are not knowledge and so do not indicate [the presence of] a mystery’ [Kt8:138(129), t.b.]. Kant’s explana­tion in Kt7 of purposiveness in nature and of beauty as the ‘symbol of moral­ity’[16] could therefore be regarded as attempts to justify, from the judicial standpoint, the feelings of awe that arise out of meditation on the mysteries of systemt and systemp. This observation—that Kant’s own re­ligious experience arose more profoundly in his meditative contact with con­science and nature than in his participation in organized religion—can ade­quately explain why he chose beauty and teleology as the topics of Kt7 (the Critique he explicitly regards as providing a religious answer to the question ‘What may I hope?’ [see KSP1:XI.1]), rather than more traditional forms of religion.[17]

       This account of why Kant mentions only two sources of admiration and awe seems to fit best with Kant’s own explanation. However, there is another alternative. If ‘the starry heavens’ refers not to the limits of the theoretical standpoint, but rather to the limits of the judicial standpoint (i.e., not to the first but to the third Critique [see e.g., Wa63a:265]), then the problem becomes one of discovering something in the former system that Kant views with ‘ever new and increasing admiration and awe’. There are, in fact, several a priori elements or functions of the mind that Kant admits are ultimately mysterious. In Kt1:180-1, for example, he says ‘schematism ... is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze.’ This is the answer Heidegger offers in He29. However, the best answer, I believe, can be found by taking note of the sections of Kt1 that most captured Kant’s own attention in an ‘ever new and increasing’ way—namely, ‘The Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding’ and the ‘Paralogisms of Pure Reason’, because these are the only two major sections of Kt1 that Kant almost completely rewrote for the second edition. The common factor between these two sections is that in both Kant devotes considerable attention to discussing the implications of what he calls ‘the radical faculty of all our knowledge, namely, ... transcen­dental apperception’ [Kt1:A114]. This clue suggests that his sense of ‘I’, as the subjective source of the categories, is the ‘brute fact’ that constitutes the ultimate limit of systemt, and is therefore what best corresponds to the starry heavens and the moral law.

       Kant’s treatment of the ‘unity of apperception’ does indeed have a certain mystical flavor. For Kant is not referring simply to the ordinary person’s em­pirical sense of ‘I’, but to a deeper, transcendental limit of all human experi­ence—a limit that comes into view only as we gradually forget about (i.e., hold in abeyance) the empirical diversity of our ordinary experiences. And this, like Kant’s overall a priori approach, is remarkably similar to the mystic’s claim that in order to experience God (cf. answer philosophical questions) we must first go through an experience of unknowing. Eckhart, for instance, says ‘the more completely you are able to draw in your powers to a unity and forget all those things and their images which you have absorbed ... the nearer you are to [this experience]. To achieve an interior act, a man must collect all his powers into a corner of his soul ... hiding away from all images and forms ... Here, he must come to a forgetting and an unknow­ing’ [q.i. Fo88:259-260]. Forman exam­ines this process of forgetting in some detail, noting that it eventually serves to revitalize the very details of life that had been ‘forgotten’ [see 263]. In the same way, the ‘I think’ is for Kant the thought-less core or starting point of all thought; apperception is the perceptionless perception of ‘I’ that enables us to become aware of all our perceptions. As such, it establishes the (Transcenden­tal) Perspective that empowers us to view the empirical details of human knowledge in an enlightened (self-conscious) way.

       The role of transcendental apperception as the ‘missing’ element in Kant’s description of his experience of ‘awe and admiration’ is actually implicit in the text quoted above from Kt4:161-2. For it is ‘the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’ that give rise to this mystical experience; they are experienced as awesome only when (and because) ‘I associate them directly with the consciousness of my own existence’—that is, only if I experience them as ‘at one’ with the deepest layer of my self-identity, my transcendental apperception. That this experience is immediate is confirmed in the recently discovered fragment on inner sense, where Kant describes apperception as follows: ‘I am immediately and originally conscious of myself as an entity in the world’ [Kt68:(257)]. But because this aspect of Kant’s mystical awe remains implicit, I shall devote the final section of this chapter to a closer look at the two objects of Critical meditation Kant acknowledges more explicitly.

 

4. Meditative Metaphors and the Shaping of a Mystical World View

       We have already considered in some detail how, as Webb puts it, ‘Kant’s attitude towards the moral law is always profoundly religious, full of ... what Professor Otto ... taught us to call das Numinoses’ [We26:58; see notes X.11,17]. Kant says, for example, that our soul regards ‘with the highest wonder’ and with exalted ‘admiration ... the original moral predisposition itself in us’ [Kt8:49(44)], for ‘the very incomprehensibility of the predisposition ... announces a divine ori­gin’ [49-50(45)]. An autobiographical remark towards the end of his life shows that Kant put into practice the theory of conscience he propounds:

 

... when composing my writings, I have always pictured this judge as standing at my side to keep me not only from error that corrupts the soul, but even from any careless expression that might give offence. And ... now, in my seventy-first year, ... I can hardly help thinking that I may well have to answer for this very soon to a judge of the world who scrutinizes men’s hearts [Kt65:9-10].

 

This meditative attitude towards the moral law can be adequately summarized as an attempt not to know God, but to acknowledge and accept God’s proper role as ‘a knower of hearts’ [Kt9:21.147; Kt64:269(212)].

       Unfortunately, commentators are usually not as aware of Kant’s pro­foundly religious attitude towards nature. Webb, for instance, laments ‘that Kant did not more clearly perceive in his own attitude in the presence of the starry heavens a proof that Religion has other roots than the experience of moral obligation’ [We26:177]. However, the fact that Kant refuses to accept any theoretical proof as adequate to demonstrate the existence of God, and therefore insists that religion can claim a rational basis only in morality, does not mean he fails to appreciate the religious significance of the immediate presence of God in nature. On the contrary, as we saw in KSP1:IX.3 [s.a. IV.3, above, and note AIV.14], Kant admits the force of the teleological argu­ment for God’s exis­tence, as long as it is viewed as providing good empirical reasons for belief, rather than as an absolutely certain, theoretical proof. Surely, this indicates just as clear a perception of the presence of God in the experience of nature as in ‘the experience of moral obligation’—though in nei­ther case is this perception or feeling a sufficient basis for theoretical proof. In­deed, evidence of Kant’s meditative attitude towards nature can be found both in the details of his life and in the contents of his writings.

       Kant’s mother, whom he greatly respected, taught him at an early age to appreciate his natural surroundings.[18] As he once told his friend Jachmann, ‘she planted and tended the first seeds of good in me. She opened my heart to the impressions of nature; she awakened and widened my ideas, and her teachings have had an enduring, healing influence on my life’ [q.i. Kl52:16]. In his early adulthood (between 1746 and 1755) Kant worked as a live-in tutor for several wealthy families who lived on country estates near Königsberg. During these seven or eight years [cf. Wa01:19-21 and Kl52:22-3] he must have had ample opportunity to experience the hand of God in nature, as his mother had taught him. Having been a theology student at Königsberg University—a fact strangely denied by McCarthy [Mc86:59]—he also preached sermons occasionally in the nearby village churches [Ba03:xviii; Ca81:32].

       Even after becoming a professor at the age of forty-six [Wa01:34], Kant disci­plined himself to break away from the lively conversation at his dinner table at four in the afternoon in order to enjoy an hour or more of peaceful walking. These daily walks he usually took in solitude, either along the river Pregel (on what is now called the ‘Philosophers’ Embank­ment’) or to the north-west of town along various garden paths [40-1; Kl52:48]. (He also enjoyed ‘going for excursions into the country surrounding his native town’, especially to the ‘idyllic’ forest just a mile to the north-east, where in 1764 he composed Kt57, his pre-Copernican essay on aesthetic feeling [Kl52:27-8].) As he walked, he was careful to keep his mouth closed and breathe through his nose, because he believed this could help prevent dis­ease—but perhaps also as an excuse for walking alone in silence [49]. (Kant describes his attitude towards the proper relation between thinking, walking, and eating in Kt65:109-110, adding an interesting footnote about ‘drinking air’ through the nose [110-111n].) Such an interest in keeping disciplined periods of silence and solitude is likely to give rise to a religious experience of some sort, even if one is not consciously foster­ing a mystical bent. Furthermore, Kant usually fasted on ‘nothing but water’ in between his once-a-day afternoon meals.[19] That Kant may have been more conscious of the spiritual benefit of his disciplined lifestyle than is gen­erally recognized is suggested by the fact that, upon returning home from his walks, he would spend the next few hours doing what could well be called meditating: ‘As darkness began to fall, he would take his seat at the stove, and with his eye fixed on the tower of Loebenicht church would ponder on the problems which exercised his mind.’[20]

       The impact of Kant’s meditative mind-set on his attitude towards nature is clearly reflected in his writings on nature. For example, he says in Kt46:431: ‘Man, who is intrusted with the economy of the earth, [not only] possesses a capacity [‘for contemplation and admiration’ of nature], but also takes pleasure in learning to know it, and through his insights praises the Creator.’ The book that contains Kant’s most important empirical ‘insights’ into nature (viz., Kt43), proposing a revolutionary new theory of the universe (often called the Kant-Laplace the­ory), has at times an ‘almost mystical tone’.[21] In the ‘Opening Discourse’ Kant explicitly links his reflections to his experience of the presence of God: ‘at each step I saw the clouds ... dissipate, and ... the splendour of the Highest Being break forth with the most vivid brilliance.’[22] As he draws his discussion to a close he exclaims at one point that ‘God ... paints [malt] himself in all his creatures’ [Kt43:360(190), alt.], thus hinting at the view he develops in Kt7 of nature as the artwork of God.[23] And in the final paragraph of Kt43 he makes one of his most profound statements relating to the mystical experience of the hand of God in nature: ‘In the universal silence of nature and in the calm of the senses the immortal spirit’s hidden faculty of knowledge speaks an ineffa­ble language and gives [us] undeveloped concepts, which are indeed felt, but do not let themselves be described’ [367].

       This attitude towards nature is by no means limited to Kant’s early, pre-Copernican writings. In Kt19:410, when he had already adopted the Coperni­can doctrine of in­tuition, he nevertheless affirms that ‘we intuit all things in God’—an allusion to Spinoza repeated several times in Kt9 as well [see XII.3]. Far from giv­ing up this view in his later life, his entire philosophical System can be regarded as an explanation of its implications [see e.g., Kt6:482]. Thus, in a passage much like that quoted above, from the end of Kt43, he says

 

the contemplation of the profound wisdom of the divine creation in the smallest things, and its majesty in the great ... is a power which cannot only transport the mind into that sinking mood, called adoration, annihilating men, as it were, in their own eyes; it is also, in respect of its own moral determination, so soul-elevating a power that words, in comparison, ... must needs pass away as empty sound because the emotion arising from such a vision of the hand of God is inex­pressible. [Kt8:197(185-6)]

 

The main difference between this and his earlier endorsements of the mystical contemplation of nature is that he now distinguishes between the fanatical ten­dency to allow oneself to be annihilated by the mystical ‘vision’ and the Critical mysticism whereby one accepts the inexpressible but immediate presence of God as a private confirmation of the moral postulate of God’s exis­tence.

       If we now recall Schweitzer’s definition of the mystic as the person who feels a connection with the eternal even ‘amid the earthly and temporal’, and who sees this very division as somehow transcended [see note X.1], then we can safely conclude that Kant’s deep awareness of the ‘beyond’ towards which nature and conscience point us qualifies him as being a mystic. A further confirmation of this conclusion comes in Kt64:264(204-5), when the philoso­pher whose ‘bent’ in life is supposed to have been ‘remote’ from any emotional experience of God’s presence[24] declares that, in the end, the only solution to the problem of evil is a full appreciation of God’s presence in one’s con­templa­tive experience of nature (‘the world’) and conscience (‘practical rea­son’):

 

The world, as a work of God, may be contemplated by us as a divine publication of the designs of his will.... For there [i.e., in the ‘authentic theodicée’ provided by our experience of God] God is by our reason the very expounder of his own will announced by the creation; ... that is not the exposition of a reasoning (speculative) practical reason, but of a practical reason possessing potency, which ... may be considered as the immediate declaration and voice of God, by which he giveth a meaning to the letter of his creation.

 

       The final confirmation of the mystical character of Kant’s world view will re­quire a thoroughgoing examination of Kt9, for in this work Kant attempts to realize his long-standing dream [see II.2-4] of establishing a Critical mysticism on the basis of his Critical metaphysics. When we examine this work in Chapters XI-XII, we shall see that it treats the hand of God in nature and the voice of God in conscience as two sides of one mystical reality. At this point we can observe that the limitations placed on mysticism in Kt18 provided Kant with a context for developing a fully Critical mysticism in his writings prior to Kt9. Although Kant lacked a name for his new view of how human beings experience God, he did not lack a clear understanding of how it works, nor did he fail to practice it in his own life. More­over, as noted in AII.1, Kant has influenced mystics of many types, leading them down a Critical path that protects them from the pitfalls of fanaticism. What remains to be seen is how Kt9 confirms and/or further clarifies the role of Critical mysticism in Kant’s System of Perspectives.

       A helpful way to conclude this initial inquiry will be to relate Kant’s dual emphasis on experiencing the voice of God in conscience and the hand of God in nature to his metaphor of the Critical philosopher as standing on the shore­line between the sea and the land. As Beck observes: ‘Kant speaks of hugging the shore of experience and staying far away from the high and stormy seas of metaphysical speculation. Yet that may have been where his heart was.’[25] Indeed, we can picture Kant standing on the wet sand at the beach near Königs­berg, with the waves periodically splashing over his feet, contemplating the moral law as he watches the sun setting below the horizon and the stars gradu­ally appearing overhead. This im­agery is admittedly somewhat fanciful, yet it is suggested by Kant’s own favorite metaphors, and can be regarded as highly appropriate in light of the architectonic structure of his System of Perspectives. For the Critical philoso­pher stands at the crossroads of immediate experience [see Fig. III.4], casting a reflective gaze over the earth of empirical knowledge on one side and the sea of transcendental faith on the other, and recognizes that only on the boundary between these two can a person fully appreciate the awesome presence of God as it manifests itself in the voice of conscience in one’s heart and in the vision of the starry heavens in nature.

 

 

Figure X.1: Four Basic Metaphors of Critical Mysticism

 

       None of these perspectives on its own suffices to define human nature, yet together they suggest the picture of Kant’s mystical world view shown in Fig­ure X.1. These four metaphors correspond directly to the main divisions in Kant’s System.[26] The sea (as viewed from the shoreline) represents Transcendental critique, the source of the theoretical knowledge examined in Kt1; conscience (the heart) gives us immediate awareness of our freedom, as informed by the moral law, and is therefore the existential source of the practical knowledge ex­amined in Kt4; the earth represents experience, the source of the judicial knowledge of beauty and purpose examined in Kt7; and the starry heavens rep­resent metaphysical reality, the ultimate (yet unreachable)[27] object of Kant’s philosophical love, and so also (following the analogy of dreams in Kt18) of his Critical mysticism, which itself corresponds to the ‘I’ of apperception.

       Kant is not called the ‘sage of Königsberg’ for nothing. As a true sage, he makes his home quietly on the borderlands, denying all extremes, including extreme mysticism. Thus, his world view does not really fit into any of the three categories of mysticism mentioned in X.1, but establishes a fourth category instead. He offers the common person[28] a vision of life—a Critical mysticism —that can be enjoyed by any and everyone who is willing to submit to the God of the shoreline, the God who always escapes our theoretical grasp, yet speaks to each of us in the universal experiences of nature and conscience.

 

  [1].  Sc31:1. Schweitzer distinguishes between ‘primitive’ mysticism, based on a ‘magical act’ leading to supposed oneness with God, and ‘developed’ mysti­cism, whereby this union ‘takes place through an act of thinking’ [1-2]. He argues that Paul the Apostle does not have ‘the usual mentality of a mystic. The exoteric and the esoteric go hand in hand.... [For] mysticism is combined with a non-mys­tical conception of the world’ [25]. Schweitzer’s interpretation of Paul’s mysticism of ‘being in Christ’ is strikingly similar to the interpretation of Kant’s mysticism I will offer here in Part Four. Both forge a middle path between the extremes of magical and intellectual mysticism, and in so doing they avoid the greatest ‘danger of all mysticism’, which ‘is that of becoming supra-ethical’ [297]. In Sc51b Schweitzer makes a rather different distinction between two world views: a ‘life affirmation’ that ‘is dualistic and doctrinaire’ (i.e., ethical) and a ‘life negation’ that ‘is monistic and mystical’ [10]. Pegging Kant as ‘dualistic’, he places him along with most other western philosophers in the former class [12]. Schweitzer’s ideal world view is a combination of the two basic types, in the form of ‘[t]he enlightened ignorance of ethical mysti­cism’ [263]. He admits that Kant exemplifies the ethical side of this ideal [264]; I shall demonstrate that his System is intended to make room for the monistic, mystical side as well.

  [2].  Kant emphasizes both the subjective and the mysterious aspects of the supersensi­ble in Kt65:58-9: ‘there is something in us that we cannot cease to wonder at when we have once seen it ... This ascendancy of the supersensible man in us over the sensible, such that (when it comes to a conflict between them) the sensible is nothing ... is an object of the greatest wonder; and our wonder at this moral predis­position in us, inseparable from our humanity, only increases the longer we con­template this true (not fabricated) ideal.’ In Kt23:402-3(182-3) he says of this same ‘internal predisposition in humanity, and ... the impenetrability of the mystery which veils it’: ‘One never wearies viewing it, and admiring in one’s self a power that yields to no power of nature ...’. He then identifies ‘the mystery which ... can be felt’ as ‘the immoveable [sic] moral law’, and explains that this gives us practi­cal access to the supersensible ‘not by a feeling that grounds cognition, but by a distinct cognition, which has influence on (the moral) feeling.’ I explore this hint further in X.3-4.

  [3].  Along these lines he argues that there cannot ‘be inferred or discovered from a feeling certain evidence of a direct divine influence ... Feeling is private to every individual and cannot be demanded of others’ [Kt8:114(104-5), e.a.].

  [4].  Interestingly, Dell’Oro [De94:134n] reports that Labèrge [in La Théologie Kantienne Précritique, p.65] sees in Kt15 a ‘verification of Kant’s pantheistic conception of God.’ Dell’Oro rejects this suggestion on the grounds of an alleged ‘contradiction’, whereby Labèrge portrays Kant as attributing both necessity and contingency to ‘the things of nature’. But if we treat this instead as an intentional paradox, then we can accept it as Kant’s attempt to describe the analytic a posteriori, which, as I shall argue in XII.3, is a key component of his Critical mysticism.

  [5].  Kt8:174(162); s.a. Kt65:54-7. See AVII.1 for a discussion of the special connotations of Kant’s term, ‘Schwaermerei’ (i.e., fanaticism). Manolesco opines that much of Kant’s attack on ‘Schwaer­merei was aimed at Swedenborg’ [Ma69:19]. When reading Kant’s occasional (usually negative) comments on mysticism in later works, we should therefore keep in mind the two-edged (Critical) nature of his remarks. Even in Kt2:382-3, for example, where Kant ends the book with a reminder that Critical philosophy banishes ‘mysticism’ from theology, replacing it with science, Kant is not refuting the possibility of mystical experience, but only what he earlier calls ‘mystical idealism’ [375n]—i.e., a theoretical system based on supposedly objective interpretations of such (necessarily subjective) experiences.

  [6].  It is relevant to note here that Kant’s theory in Kt8 of a moral interpretation of scripture has a close parallel in some medieval theologians, who referred to this type of interpretation as revealing the ‘sensus mysticus of a scriptural passage’ [Ca81:389]. Unfortunately, Cassirer falls into the common trap of dismissing such interpretations as leading ‘into a mere mystical darkness’ [390], rather than as providing extreme clarity, as mystics claim they do.

  [7].  Elsewhere in the same work [Kt65:62-3n] Kant toys with the idea of a ‘mystical chronology’ that is ‘calculated a priori’ (using the numbers 4 and 7 in various combinations). Taken at face value, this text and others [e.g., Kt66:194-6] portray Kant as having a clear interest in and an open-minded attitude towards such speculations, but not a willingness to ‘join the movement’, so to speak—much like his attitude towards Swedenborg in the mid-1760s (aside from his few digressions into ridicule in Kt18). Nevertheless, some in­ter­preters insist on reading between the lines. Comment­ing on Kt65:103n, for example, White says mysticism ‘obviously fills [Kant] with horror’ [Wh90:53,56]: Kant ‘scarcely disguises his hostility towards “the sects” whose teaching he is here attacking.’ But Kant’s footnote contains no explicit hostility; rather, it is a reasoned criticism of those Pietists who proudly claim to be God’s elect, yet show no evidence of it in their conduct.

  [8].  See e.g., Kt8:153(142). Kant declares in Kt35:(48) that the laws of ethics (as opposed to legal laws) ‘do not relate to other people, but only to God and to oneself.’ That is, ethical laws are de­termined by the mutual participation of God and human beings in practical reason, the power that establishes the moral law in each individual.

  [9].  Kt16:200(Ra63:49); cf. Matt. 6:1,16 and 7:1-5. For a more thorough discussion of the relation between the moral principles of Kant and Jesus, see AV.2-4.

[10].    Oakes argues in Oa73:37 that when a person experiences God as present in some sensible object, as for example in the sound of church bells ringing, the person is ‘having a sensible experience of God, i.e., in Kantian terms, God must be under­stood as the object of her “sensible intuition”.’ In such a case, ‘the experience of God supervenes upon the experience of the bells ... That is, in so far as the experi­ence of the bells is at the same time an experience of God, the woman would thereby be having a sensible experience of God.’ Oakes is right to regard both the hearing of the bells and the experience of God as ‘mediated’ experiences. But his view of ‘God as a possible object of sensible intuition’ [37] is mistaken inas­much as it fails to take into account the perspec­tival difference between these two types of mediated experiences. Bells can mediate in our experi­ence of God by point­ing indirectly to something nonsensible beyond them: they remain symbols of a transcendent ideal that can never become an object of empirical knowledge. Yet the mediate element in our experience of the bells (as bells)—i.e., the sensible in­tuition of the bells—points directly to a real sensible object, out of which empirical knowledge can be constructed. From the Perspective of immediate (nonreflective) experi­ence, both of these are equally valid. The fundamen­tal difference between them is revealed as soon as we reflect upon them theoretically: our sensible intu­ition of the bells points ‘forward’ to a publicly verifiable empirical knowledge that can be viewed theoretically, whereas our awareness of God’s presence in such an experience points ‘back­ward’ to a transcendent and therefore theoretically unverifiable ground of all empirical knowledge.

                The closest Kant comes to allowing us to have an intuition of God is when he explains the nature of physico-theological proofs for God’s existence ‘as combining speculation and intuition’ [Kt1:665]. But he is careful to warn that this does not provide us with real theoretical knowledge, but only ‘prepare[s] the understanding for theoretical knowledge’, if used as a supplement to ‘other proofs’ (e.g., the moral argument of Kt4). This suggests that we may be able to intuit God, even though it is impossible to verify that the object of our intuition really is God. After citing this passage [Hi74:385], Hicks quotes from the Pölitz edition of Kt26 (pp.96-8) [Hi74:387n], where Kant explains that the teleological conception of God is based on ‘the experi­ence which ... is the simplest experience possible, namely, the knowledge of ourselves.’

[11].    Ot50:143. Chapman [Ch92:502] defends Otto’s approach as not being guilty of ‘the pathologi­cal response of mysticism whereby the individual was granted a direct knowledge of God.’ Of course, neither was Kant, and for essentially the same reasons; the whole point of Kant’s Critical mysticism is that an experience of God is possible at some level without producing empirical knowledge. For more on Otto, see note XII.30.

[12].    The exact distance varies from one account to another. Hedge puts the distance at just ‘seven miles from his native city’ [He49:57-8].

[13].    See note IV.1. Bax says the period of Kant’s highly regular lifestyle was mainly from 1783 to 1802 [Ba03:xxxvi].

[14].    Along these lines Fendt suggests [Fe90:85] that the Critiques can be read ‘as a kind of spiritual exercises, for their aim is to discipline Reason.’ Surely this is why the first chapter of Kt1’s Tran­scendental Doctrine of Method is entitled ‘The Discipline of Pure Reason’. The fact that the most highly self-disciplined forms of religious practice are typically mystical in character is not without significance here. The problem is that undisciplined religious dreamers are also often called ‘mystics’. As such, Critical mysticism can be regarded as a way of disciplining reason’s dreams.

[15].    Ra63:vii; cf. Wi90:95. Wallace relates the same story in more detail in Wa01:53, adding that Kant once said ‘he had held a swallow in his hand, and gazed into its eyes; “and as I gazed, it was as if I had seen into heaven.”’ There are, of course, many who question the genuineness of Kant’s faith, but without exception these doubts are always based on the interpreter not taking Kant’s own words at face value, but instead judging him on the basis of conventional standards of religiosity. Bax, for example, observes (not entirely accurately): ‘He never ... practised the rites of any cultus, public or private. He never attended church ... It must always remain a delicate question in how far Kant really believed in the necessity, nay, even the possibility, of a theology based solely on practical considerations’ [Ba03:lxviii-lxix]. Concerning Kant’s moral proof, he further speculates that there may be ‘a Mephistopholic smile lurking somewhere between the lines.’ Having already dealt with such claims in IV.1, AIV.3, and notes VIII.4,34,49, I am not taking them into account here.

[16].    See Kt7:351-4 and KSP1:IX.2-3. An aspect of Kt7 that is often ignored in discussions of Kant’s theology or philosophy of religion is his theory of the sublime. Hand makes up for this neglect in Ha83, though he regards the appeal to morality as ‘a distortion of the experience of the sublime’ necessitated solely by ‘Kant’s architectonic’ [68]. This criticism collapses once we regard archi­tectonic as a positive force rather than a negative one; moreover, Kant’s position can be strength­ened by recognizing that it does not require a person who experiences the sublime to have a con­scious awareness of being morally good; the point instead is that it is a transcendental condition of the possibility of experiencing the sublime for it be possible for us to be morally good. Without defending his claim, Hand opines that the assumption of a formless ‘Presence in nature’ [68-9] could readily replace Kant’s appeal to the moral law to explain our experience of the sublime.

                Earlier [Ha83:43] Hand observes that none of the three major commentators on Kt7 ‘once mentioned the idea of God in Kant’s theory of the sublime.’ In Kt57 even Kant did not ‘mention the idea of God in the experience of the sublime’ [Ha83:46]. Nevertheless, ‘the idea of infinity ... is essential for the experience of the sublime’ [56] and ‘the infinite itself is thought of as the supersensible substrate of nature. In other words, we have passed over to the Ideal of Pure Reason where the Infinite Being is the common substratum of Nature’ [56-7]. As such, we can regard the sublime as one of Kant’s key examples of how we experience the hand of God in nature. ‘Kant did explicitly mention God as manifesting His wrath and sublimity in natural events’—i.e., in the dynamically sublime, but not in the ‘mathematically sublime’ [57]. For an interesting modern analysis of the sublime using a quasi-Kantian approach, see Ts98.

                Kant’s theory of the sublime is thus closely associated with what is traditionally referred to as the fear of God—a type of fear that is very different from ordinary fear. As Hand notes [Ha:83:62n], Kant’s first connection of God with the sublime comes in Kt7:263. Both God and the sublime are ‘a source of fear’ [Ha:83:59]; in both cases, if ‘our own position is secure’, the experi­ence makes the object ‘all the more attractive’, yet ‘[t]o be actually afraid would exclude the experience of sublimity.’ According to Hand [60], the Kantian source of our security in the face of an experience of the sublime is our immortality, though he admits Kant does not explicitly state this. Through such experiences, ‘objects in nature reveal to us a supersensible faculty’ [60]. ‘In the ... dynamical­ly sublime’, Hand adds [62], ‘the infinite power in nature is considered to be God.’ Hand makes the significant point [63] that we only need to be afraid of the sublime’s power if we have not lived a morally good life, because then the prospects of a final judgment are daunting. This is the source of the sublime’s deep relation to the practical standpoint. As such, Kant regards ‘a morally upright disposition’ as being ‘a second necessary condition for the experience of the sublime (the first was physical safety)’ [63]. Against Kant, Hand argues ‘that God in nature appears as a non-moral force’ because the thought of being judged ‘by God after death is certainly extraneous to the experience’ of both types of sublimity [67]. Hand may well be correct here. But Kant might counter that such a morally-charged thought ought to be present in anyone who wishes to enjoy the sublime and give the experience a rational interpretation.

[17].    Kant confirms this assumption in Kt7:482n [s.a. Kt6:483]: ‘Both the admiration for beauty and the emotion excited by the profuse variety of ends in nature ... have something about them akin to a religious feeling.’ From an explicitly Kantian (Transcendental) Perspective, Otto expounds in more detail the implications of this view of religious feeling [see Ot50:45,112-4]. Otto’s claim that our deep religious (or mystical) experiences have an essentially mysterious (i.e., nonrational and even nonmoral) factor might seem to be a direct rejection of Kant’s emphasis on reason as the source of both natural and moral knowledge. But in fact they are almost entirely consistent. Otto’s account of Kant’s statements regarding the impact of conscience and nature on his philosophical feeling would be something like this. Kant experiences awe when confronted with the moral law and starry skies because he recognizes these as symbols of a transcendent, mysterious source of the two sides of human existence. They represent the two ‘brute facts’ against which we ‘bump our heads’, so to speak, in our efforts to discover the one ultimate Reason that gives rise to human reason. This Reason creates nature and creates morality, but is it itself rational and moral? The fundamental tenet of Kant’s theoretical philosophy is that we cannot know the answer to such a question. And that is precisely the reason our experience of these two limits arouses such ‘admiration and awe’! (This paradoxical situation often arises, incidentally, when self-reference is applied to a fundamental principle: the principle itself cannot be coherently submitted to the criteria it imposes.) Once the perspectival character of Kant’s thinking is taken into account, it becomes clear that he would have no trouble accepting such an explanation of his deepest experiences. ‘Reason’ is, for Kant, the ultimately unknowable mystery that generates all our human capacities for knowledge and goodness [cf. AIV.4; s.a. Kt5:461-2; Kr56:32; Wi90:128].

[18].    Ba03:xv-xvi; Wa01:12,53. This was no doubt an aspect of her Pietism, which ‘laid great stress on radical inwardness’ and involved ‘intensity of emotion’ [Cr94:122], though for some of its founders, ‘the education of the will’ was equally important.

                Manolesco says that before writing Kt18 ‘Kant had still maintained some mystic remnants from his youth.’ [Ma69:14], and that by 1770, the traditional starting-point of his Critical (Coper­nican) period, ‘he managed to rid himself completely of his mystic baggage’ [20], by which he is referring mainly to Kant’s ‘painful’ years at a religious school [24-5]. I argued in Chapter II that in writing Kt18 Kant’s youthful ‘baggage’ was not destroyed completely, but was transformed. As such, his Critical philosophy can be regarded as a defense of his mother’s genuine faith against the domineering tendencies of his early teachers. McCarthy [Mc86:58] expresses a similar notion: ‘Even as he was neither a deist nor an atheist, Kant was finally neither a pietist nor a mystic.’ But to this claim I would add ‘not purely’; for in a Critical sense, he was paradoxically both.

[19].    Kl52:49. Jachmann reports this rather differently: Kant ‘wholly renounced supper’ only after Green’s death, for it was a ‘time, once sacred to his most intimate friendship, he wished to pass in silence, as a sacrifice to his deceased friend’ [q.i. Ba03:xxvi]. This, too, would suggest that his de­cision to eat only once a day was a genuine discipline of fasting, performed for a spiritual purpose.

[20].    Wa01:41. Kant also ‘sat in meditation’ from about five until six each morning, a habit he valued so highly that he once remarked: ‘This is the happiest time of the day for me’ [q.i. Kl52:48].

[21].    Wa01:108. Jaki’s translation of Kt43 is unfortunately over-literal, and his introduc­tion and notes are grossly unfair to Kant’s true position. I have criticized Jaki’s ap­proach in detail in Pa87b.

[22].    Kt43:222(81). With such near-visionary experiences in his background, Kant’s reputation as an inspiring lecturer should come as no surprise. As Jachmann reports [q.i. Ba03:xxv]: ‘Kant seemed to himself and all present, as though inspired by a Divine power, which enchanted their hearts for ever to him.’ To whom God’s hand is made visible, God’s voice is often made audible.

                In a rather different context, referring to Kant’s treatment of issues relating to the mind-body problem, Laywine [La93:124] says ‘the early Kant might have claimed to touch the intangible.’ While I have cast some doubt on this conjecture [see AII.2], it does have the merit of being consistent with what I regard as Kant’s inherently mystical disposition.

[23].    That Kant’s artist-God also has a sense of humor is suggested by his comment in a 1795 letter to Schiller, that reflecting on such oddities as the nature of impregnation ‘opens up an abyss of thought for the human reason.’ Albeit reluctantly, it seems necessary ‘to assume providence to have chosen this arrangement, in a playful manner, as it were, to avoid monotony’ [AA12.11 (Ba03:xlv)].

                Davidovich says Kt7’s ‘purpose is to establish a perspective’ that enables us to make sense of ‘purposiveness’ [Da93a:25-6]. ‘The solution is to be found in a type of contemplation that participates equally in’ theoretical knowing and practical acting [26]. This means [29] Kt7’s ‘task is neither theoretical nor practical, but contemplative.’ For example [Da93a:31], ‘in contemplat­ing beautiful objects in nature we gain an awareness of something beyond it.’ Making frequent use of perspectival terminology much like that used in KSP1, Davidovich stresses that the key perspec­tive in Kt7 is not God’s, but humanity’s [33]: ‘this perspective is the status of the rational agent as an end in itself.’ From Kt7’s standpoint [38], ‘reflective faith in grace ... is ... a belief that nature is ultimately conducive to the realization of moral ends.... [This] is not a practical ability; it becomes possible through the faculty of judgment.’ Hand likewise says [Ha83:48] ‘the sublime’ and ‘the beautiful’ have in common that ‘both please’ through ‘a contemplative kind of pleasure which is not a means to something else.’ When we take into consideration the fact that systemj takes up the standpoint of critique itself and is therefore the most fundamental of Kant’s three standpoints, this view of the judicial standpoint as essentially contemplative fits right in with the notion that one of the main purposes of Kant’s System is to pave the way for Critical mysticism.

[24].    We26:60. Such a stoic view of Kant is flatly contradicted by the accounts of Kant’s personality given by those who knew him personally. One of his closest friends, Jachmann, describes him as ‘a spirited orator, sweeping the heart and emo­tions along with him, as well as satisfying the intelligence’ [q.i. Kl52:34], and adds that in social gatherings he was unsurpassed: ‘All his friends were unani­mously of the opinion that they had never known a more interesting companion’ [q.i. 45]. Moreover, Kant openly described himself as having a ‘very easily af­fected, but otherwise carefree spirit’ [q.i. 32]. What Kant objected to was not emotion as such, but ‘emotional thinking’ [52]. With this in mind, Walsh’s claim, that for Kant ‘the path to God starts from the moral emotions’ [Wa63a:287], is rather odd. It makes sense only if ‘emotions’ here refers to our immediate experience—either of nature (giving rise to judgments of beauty and sublimity) or of the moral law (giving rise to the feeling of respect).

[25].    Be86:11. For evidence of this sentiment, see Kt2:262, Kt12:475, and Kt15:65-6(220). The best known passage of this sort is Kt1:294-5, where Kant describes the domain of ‘pure understanding’ as ‘an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is the land of truth—enchanting name!—surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which [like dreams!] he can never aban­don and yet is unable to carry to completion.’ Kant’s use of the word ‘horizon’ (a word that occurs 16 times in Kt1 [Pa87a:171]) is closely related to his analogy of the shoreline. In Kt1:353-354, for instance, Kant compares the illusion created by the antinomies to the fact that the sea appears to be ‘higher at the horizon than at the shore’.

[26].    Figure X.1 is a corrected and improved version of the diagram first published in Philosophy & Theology 4:1, p.89, where it was distorted almost beyond recognition by the editor’s apparent over-confidence in computerized text-transfer technology. In any case, the metaphors correspond much more directly in this revised version both to Figure III.4, above, and to Figure III.8 of KSP1.

[27].    Kant expounds his Critically-enlightened metaphysics in Kt3, Kt6, and Kt9. But as we shall see in the following two chapters, he was never quite able to realize the starry-eyed goals of Kt9.

[28].    Kuehn rightly insists in Ku85:168 that ‘Kant makes ... very clear that he is on the side of the common man or common sense.’ ‘For Kant’, unlike many of his Enlightenment contempo­raries, ‘the “crowd” is not an object of contempt.’ In Kt18, when the key features of his mature philosophy were just beginning to dawn on him, Kant openly acknowledges ‘the depen­dence of our judgment upon the common sense of man’ [334(63)]. For, as he puts it in Kt18:325(49), ‘Common sense often perceives a truth before comprehending the reasons with which to prove or explain it.’ It is important to point out, however, that, the philosopher’s task is to explicate common sense; it is therefore unjustifiable for the philosopher ‘boldly to appeal to the common sense of mankind [i.e., instead of giving arguments]—an expedient which always is a sign that the cause of reason is in desperate straits’ [Kt1:811-812; s.a. Kt2:259(7)]. Unfortunately, because Kant puts in the place of such specious methods a complex tangle of abstract terminology and argumentation, his belief that his System of Perspectives upholds the view of the common person [see e.g., Kt1:859] is often ignored or not taken seriously. Yet the overall purpose of his System is certain to be misunderstood if its aim in this respect is ignored. For the whole of Kant’s philosophical project can be seen as an attempt to place limitations on the various extremes that threaten to sway ordinary people away from the beliefs and actions towards which their reason naturally points the way [see e.g., xxxif]. Thus Velkley [Ve85:101] is right to portray Kant’s ‘transcen­dental turn’ as implying that ‘theoretical philosophy can have no higher theme than “ordinary experience”.’ Indeed, this emphasis carries over into Kant’s personal attitudes as well. Thus, he says in Kt4:76-77 that ‘to a humble plain man, in whom I perceive righteousness in a higher degree than I am conscious of in myself, my mind bows, whether I choose or not ...’.

 

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