{232} (cont‘d)
b) Its own intelligibility
What is the intelligibility proper to the moral fact? We are not going to explain this point in detail since this would imply a complete summary of the philosophy of Kant, well known to all. Therefore, we are only going to recall the two central ideas of Kant.
According to Kant, morality rules absolutely, categorically, with full rigor, over all conditions of time and space. But no one in time and space, regardless how moral he may be, can realize morality in all its fullness and in all its integrity. Consequently, the moral imperative would be impossible unless we had available an “infinite progress”, and not simply the finite mobility in which the life of man consists. In other words, the intelligibility proper to the moral order, which is what Kant calls “holiness” (Heiligkeit), demands immortality.
On the other hand, the achievement of morality —Kant says— is eudaimonía, happiness (Glückseligkeit). What happens is that no one is happy. Happiness consists in everything going well with the intelligence and with the will; but no one is completely happy, no one realizes that supreme goodness. This is why it is necessary for the supreme goodness of the will to have a cause that is intelligible and real, which is God.
{233} The immortality of the soul and the existence of God are the two conditions that cannot be demonstrated speculatively. The only thing that can be demonstrated is the existence of freedom. But those two truths are included —we shall immediately see in what way— in the very transcendental freedom.
Indeed, let us ask in the first place, what are these conditions of intelligibility? And in the second, what are the characteristics these conditions have?
What are, then, these conditions of intelligibility of transcendental freedom we have just enunciated, immortality and God? As we mentioned, they are not propositions that can be demonstrated; in this sense, Kant calls them postulates. What does Kant understand by postulates? They are not postulates in the sense of the postulate of the parallel lines of Euclid. They certainly are propositions that cannot be demonstrated in the sense of speculative reason, but are objectively included and required in that of which they are postulates, i.e., in the very intelligibility of freedom; they are objective exigencies of freedom. Kant refers in a note found in the Critique of Practical Reason to the ingenious Wizenmann1, who told him that his argument was similar to the one that being fully in love believes that the images of his love have reality in the world. Kant replied to that argument by saying that if he were referring there to demands derived from an inclination (Neigung) then his critic would be correct, but that is not the case. The moral imperative is an objective imperative; for that reason what it demands is also included {234} in the objective world. It is not the case, therefore, of a postulate that may satisfy some sentiments, because morality is not a sentiment, but an imperative of reason. And therefore, the objectivity of morality includes, although it may not be by way of demonstration, but by way of an intrinsic exigency of intelligibility, God and the immortality of the soul. As Kant will say, freedom is the “arch keystone” of the whole of metaphysics.
In the second place, what is the ultimate and radical characteristic of this morality or of the conditions of intelligibility? Let us think about what we have just indicated. The immortality of the soul proceeds from the fact that morality, which is purely moral, could not be accomplished physically in the course of a finite life and needs an infinite life. Also from the fact that the happiness of which man is capable would not be achieved perfectly if there is no cause different from him. Why is this so? Here the conflict between nature and morality surfaces. Then, what Kant tells us is that this conflict cannot exist. The postulates of practical reason, that is, the conditions of intelligibility of the moral imperative are the real and formal coincidence between the moral and the natural, between nature and morality. Immortality is something demanded by duty in the order of nature; God is something demanded for the achievement of happiness. Precisely by being objective imperative, these conditions of coincidence have to exist; you must, therefore you can (Du sollst, also du kannst). Otherwise, where is a categorical imperative going to come from, if it was not the case that this imperative has an adequate objective, objectively adequate and objectively imposed? Because of this, what pure reason has declared as merely possible —the transcendent— practical reason really reaches it; in this sense, at the hands of practical reason we have achieved a {235} transcendent metaphysics, which speculative reason was radically incapable of achieving.
What characteristics does this Metaphysics have? The first thing we must say is that, for Kant, it is basically an immanent metaphysics. What happens here is the same that happened with the consideration of res corporea or res cogitans. It is “immanent” in the sense that what metaphysics discovers and attains is in the given. It is determined intelligibly by the understanding, but it is something immanent, as immanent as, from another point of view, the properties of extension or the res cogitans may be, considered by the metaphysics of Leibniz.
It might be said that the parallelism is false, since there it is a case —in the res corporea and the res cogitans— of an immanent metaphysics, but here of a tanscendent metaphysics. How is it possible that we may now affirm that the metaphysics of Kant is immanent? For that, it is indispensable not to forget what happens with the fact of morality. It is the “fact of a thing in itself”, which is equivalent to saying that, in the end, the transcendent to which practical reason arrives, is something immanently given in it. Precisely the person is the immanent fact of something transcendent; it is the fact of reality as “thing in itself”. It follows that this attainment of the transcendent by the will of man is something that, strictly speaking, is immanent. In the end, the transcendent metaphysics of Kant is the transcendent metaphysics of something immanent. It is the transcendent metaphysics of the person.
In the second place, it is a metaphysics in which reason, by means of concepts, reaches the objective reality of the thing in itself, namely, immortality and God. How can anyone claim the contrary, that Kant has said something completely opposite to what we have just indicated?
Kant has told us that the concepts are applied; but, {236} what are these concepts? The conceptual intelligibility of transcendental freedom is what makes that man may have to intellectually affirm the immortality of the soul and the existence of God. What is happening is that these two terms, immortality (including liberty itself), and the existence of God, whose reality is assured objectively, really, and actually by practical reason —in the way we have just said—, however, are not apprehended by representative concepts, but by constitutive ones. That is another question. They are not apprehended by representative concepts, but as Kant says, they assure us of the reality, a reality of which we cannot make a concept (uns keinen Begriff machen können)2.
Nevertheless, what is clear is what we have indicated above, that it is the case of an immanent metaphysics, understood as the metaphysics of something that is immanent and transcendent at the same time, as the person is. And in second place, it is an attainment to the transcendent order by mean of concepts. Therefore, regardless of the reshaping these concepts may require it is something rigorously known intellectually. The metaphysics of practical reason is anything except a blind irrational sentiment.
In the third place, why, indeed, are these concepts constitutive, but not comparable to those of speculative reason? Simply because here the fact is not an object, but something that should be; it is something in the practical order, not a fact of the representative order; that is why the concepts are not representative. The transcendental synthesis depends
—we were saying— on the type of the given; and here the given is not a subject, but a free determination; but it is rigorously intelligible, which means it has intellective predicates.
{237} Actually, Kant himself tells us in the Critique of Practical Reason, we have “a knowledge, but only in a practical aspect (eine Erkenntnis, aber nur im praktisher Beziehung)”3 —he means about the soul and God. Because if we try to think with concepts, for example, what God can be, Kant says we shall be reduced to two predicates, intelligence and will. Of these we must say that intelligence is an intelligence “that does not think, but intuits” (der nicht denkt, sondem anschaut), and that the will is directed to objects on whose existence that very will does not depend. Consequently Kant writes, “all these are properties about which we have no concepts”; that is, that they may serve to represent their object to us. Indeed, who has a representation of what the divine intelligence is or what the divine will is? Of course, that question may seem to be a kind of lifesaver we throw at Kantian philosophy; however, we would have to think, for example, of the tons of lifesavers that have been thrown at the exegesis of St. Thomas or Scotus; apparently, this cannot be done with Kant. But, putting this aside, let us stay with the very facts of Kant. Kant says that from the practical point of view, of these properties of reason and will, we are only left as residue with the concept of “relationship”, which determines practical law, and therefore, objective reality. But then, Kant distinguishes here quite clearly between what a representative concept is and what mere intellection is. How could Kant possibly say this relationship is unintelligible? It is perfectly an act of intelligence, it is known intellectually; what happens is that it does not lead to a representation. {238} Where is the adequate representation of what divine will may be or what the divine intelligence may be in any theology, beginning with the Old and New Testament? Nowhere at all. When Kant tells us that something is intellectual, something intelligible, he wishes to say that we are left with just “the concept of a relationship” (der Begriff eines Verhältnisses)4. What has the theology of any time ever been able to supply, except this? If Kant denies the cognitive characteristic, if Kant denies we have concepts of that, he is referring to the representative concepts, i.e., that we may have a theoretical and speculative knowledge. There is no doubt that on this point an enormous abuse against him has been committed. How can we possibly admit that the mass of merely conceptive arguments constituting countless folios filling libraries belong to theology itself? If Kant denies this, it is precisely to say that we do not have an adequate representation except what is given in an intuition, in a phenomenon. Therefore, the only thing we have in this case is a kind of intellective residue, by virtue of which what the categorical imperative is cannot be intellectively understood objectively, without considering the immortality of the soul and the existence of an intelligent and volitional God. Kant presents this as terminus of an intellective act.
III. The unity of Kantian metaphysics
We now take a third step. The first step was to determine the problem of Kantian philosophy. The second dealt {239} with the constitution of the transcendental order. This third step is going to cover the unity of Kantian metaphysics.
Is it a fact that Kant admits of two metaphysics: the speculative metaphysics, referring to things that are, and another metaphysics, more or less amputated, that would be the practical metaphysics of the intellective order? I have always thought this is not true; Kantian metaphysics has a strict, rigorous unity.
First, by its way of conceptiveness.
Second, by its object.
Third, by its principle.
1. By its way of conceptiveness
The concepts of the metaphysics that refers to the philosophy we call “special”, that is, the one that deals with the world of nature or the world of the spirit (the res corporea and the res cogitans) have three moments, as we have pointed out. In the first place, they are immanent, they do not leave, at least they do not pretend to leave, the very object given. In the second place, they are constitutive; they give us constitutive properties of these objects. In the third place, they are representative, they adequately represent that which is given in experience.
But the concepts of transcendent metaphysics are not representative, we have already seen why and in what measure they are not. The fact that they are not representative does not mean at all that they are destitute of any intelligibility, as we have pointed out, because these concepts are, however, immanent and constitutive. Kant clearly mentions this. While, from the speculative point of view, the ideas of God, soul, and world are nothing but regulative ideas of reason, they are in practical reason constitutive moments of the
{240} very intelligibility of the objects that make possible the moral imperative, God and immortality. Precisely in the use of immanent and constitutive concepts is where we find, from the point of view of conceptiveness, the conceptive unity of the whole Kantian metaphysics. The fact that these concepts in one case may be representative, adequately representative, and in the other they may not be, is a difference that does not affect the unity of metaphysics, if it were to affect it, what would be left of traditional metaphysics? Here it is the case purely and simply that they are immanent and constitutive concepts. Inasmuch as the immanent metaphysics of nature and the immanent metaphysics of the spirit, as well as the metaphysics of practical reason are moved in and by immanent and constitutive concepts, metaphysics is by its way of conceptiveness a perfectly unitary system.
2. By its object
In the second place, the unity of metaphysics by reason of its object.
This may seem more problematic. It is, after all, where one always hopes to corner Kant. The object of metaphysics for Kant is always the objective reality of that which is known through concepts, and that objective reality is, therefore, inscribed on intelligibility, on the verum transcendentale, which is something determined by the internal structure of reason itself. Let us put aside this determination and simply pay attention to intelligibility.
This intelligible reality or at least intelligenda appears to be double. On the one hand, the things that are, and on the other {241} hand, goodness; in other words, correlatively to both sides, to empirical intuition and human volition. And we ask, are these two termini, the reality of things —natural real things— and goodness, irreducible for Kant? In the first place, the object of morality for Kant, that is, that which makes morality intelligible, is not the highest good; if it were so, on the one hand we would have the bonum, and on the other hand, ens, the res, but this is not true at all. What Kant demands from the existence of God as cause of the categorical imperative, that is, as cause of the supreme good, is precisely to be causa, that is, not that God may be good, but that goodness may be real. That is just what constitutes the whole pivot of the Kantian argumentation. Therefore, it is not the case of counterposing natural reality and goodness, but of doing something completely different. It is the case of just showing that in this goodness there is a res at the bottom, a res about which Kant tells us is intelligent and volitional because it precisely has a causality provided with morality. It is precisely the creative organon of the teleology of the universe. This res —Kant tells us— is necessary because without it transcendental freedom would not be objectively intelligible. On last resort, the transcendentality of God is for me the intelligibility of God as objective reality; it is the divine verum transcendentale.
Therefore, for Kant the question whether goodness and things are irreducible flows into another one. Are the verum transcendentale of God and the verum transcendentale of things, two different dimensions or two different transcendental orders? Kant tells us in the Critique of Practical Reason that “God is a supreme nature, possessing causality in conformity with morality”5. Precisely because of this, it can rule, {242} it can constitute the cause that makes the categorical moral imperative of transcendental freedom intelligible.
But Kant says something more, not in the Critique of Practical Reason, but in the Critique of Pure Reason. Indeed, after affirming that God is the systematic teleological unity of all things he literally adds, “And this unity, that (...) with respect to the sensible world can be called nature and with respect to freedom can be called the intelligible world, the moral, inevitably leads to... natural laws and moral laws, and therefore, unifies practical reason with speculative reason. The world has to be represented as emerging from an idea... by which the investigation of nature (...) is converted into a physico-theology... which brings the final ends of nature to fundaments (Gründe) that a priori have to be found indissolubly knotted (unzertrennlich verknüpft) to the internal possibility of things, that is, to a transcendental theology. This one adopts the ideal of the supreme ontological perfection as a principle of the systematic unity that entwines all things in accordance with necessary and universal natural laws, since all these same things proceed from a single primordial being (Urwesen)”6.
For Kant, in the concept of God thus achieved is just where the maximum coincidence is realized, the transcendent coincidence between the order of nature and the order of the moral. Precisely because of this, for Kant there is a unitary object of metaphysics. The transcendental order referred to God is the same as the one referred to things. This order consists of the reality inscribed in the intelligibility, in the verum. Therefore, there is a strict unity. But, what kind of unity?
{243} For Descartes, it was the case of two orders unified by a free act of the will of God, by the divine veracity. For Leibniz, it was the case that human reason would be an image of the divine reason. For medieval metaphysics it was the case that the being of God, when creating things, has impressed them with certain entifying characteristics, which are the same that God in himself eminently possesses.
Kant rebels against these interpretations. Against Descartes, it is obvious; it is not the case of veracity. Against Leibniz, because human reason is not an image of divine reason, as we saw, but essentially different from it. Against the medieval interpretation, because this whole transcendent way that leads to God is founded on the intelligibility morality has for me; however, “I” make the intelligibility, God does not make it; it is just the characteristic of my reason.
But it is absurd to think that Kant intended to say that I am the creator of God. What Kant tells us is that I have created or have in me the conditions, which make possible that God may be an intelligible for me. I ask, Where is the heterodoxy? I make the conditions that make God intelligible for me, this is clear, not for Him, because that would be another task. It is not, therefore, in the order of reality, but in the order of the cognoscible, of intelligibility, where there is a strict unity.
However, there is some difference between the order of nature and the order of the moral; but a difference that affects not the reality of things or the reality of God, but His capacity of being adequately represented by man, which is a different matter. The unity of truth does not mean a unity of intellectual comprehensibility. And reciprocally, the diversity of conceptual representability does not mean {244} a rupture of intelligibility. The unity of the verum transcendentale is always the unity of the intelligibility and this intelligibility is just made by the “I”, the “I think”.
Therefore, metaphysics has a strict unity by reason of its object, as long as we are told on last resort what the unity of metaphysics is by reason of its principle.
3. By its principle
For Kant, reason, the “I think” as a rational thinking, is what makes that things may be intelligible for me. On this there are no exceptions, for stones or for God.
It is true that the ascension to the transcendental order follows, for Kant, a different way than the traditional. Traditionally it has been thought that considering that things appear in time and space by means of a series of successions and arguments mounted on succession, we reach an entity to which we must arrive or risk the fate of making the world inexplicable. Kant follows a completely different way. Kant ascends to God not by way of the physical world, but by way of the moral world, as we have shown.
But once he has reached God, he descends to the physical world and makes us see that this physical world is a free creation of that God to whom he has arrived by way of morality. As Kant tells us, few people have believed in God and admit his existence through speculative reasoning; there are thousands and millions that have admitted it through moral reasoning. The way of Kant is different that the physical, the uniqueness of God as cause is a second step that follows a first step, which is the ascension to God by way of the will. Because actually, God is not, for Kant, a necessary entity {245} so that reason may speculatively know things —reason could never achieve this—, but is an entity absolutely necessary for reason, precisely for reason to be reason; that is the issue, for reason to be reason7. Because of this, there is a radical and formal unity between what is called practical reason and theoretic reason. Kant expressly says it, “They are one and the same reason” (Sie sind eine und die selbe Vernunft)8.
Inasmuch as through its practical slope reason reaches the transcendent, it has primacy over theoretic reason, but it does not have it in order to theoretic knowledge. This is why we can now understand the paragraph quoted above in which Kant tells us, at the end of the Critique of Pure Reason9, that the Critique has demonstrated, in the first place, that the pure concepts of understanding —the categories— do not have an empirical origin, but have their fountain and a priori source in pure reason. And in second place that applied by practical reason to something given they lead to a particular thinking about the supersensible. Now we can see how these two ways, these two aspects are for Kant purely and simply two slopes of a single transcendental order. A transcendental order constituted by the dimension of intelligibility, determined by my own reason on the condition of intelligibility.
The true principle of intelligibility and the key to metaphysics is reason in its absolute characteristic; freedom is nothing but one manifestation of it.
When Leibniz —with Wolff following him— asserts that metaphysics is the science that contains the first principles of {246} human reason, Kant would have no fundamental objection against that, as long as it had been clarified to us what these principles are. For Kant, it is the very structure of reason, inasmuch as reason is the one that determines a priori, transcendentally, the intelligibility of every possible object, whether it be an empirical object or a transcendent object.
The true entity, fundament and principle of all metaphysics is my reason. This is why the philosophy of Kant is not a rationalism; it is something I have sometimes called “reasonism” (Sp. razonismo, Zubiri neologism), which is something different. It is a “reasonism”, in other words, to found all metaphysics on the hinge of what reason is. That is why Kant is able to say, at the end of Critique of Pure Reason that philosophy comprises three questions, What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for? And these three questions —he tells us in another work10— are reduced to just one, What is man? Meaning man as reason, as seat of the absolute and of the absolute intelligibility of everything.
Nothing is intelligible except in the form its intelligibility is determined by reason. That is why, the transcendental egology of Descartes eventually culminates in the philosophy of Kant. The philosophy of Kant is expressly and thematically transcendental philosophy, the anthropological version of first philosophy.
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1 KpV, 143, note. (Kritik der praktishen Vernunft. The edition used by Zubiri is the one published by the well-known “Philosophishe Bibliotek”, Ed. Meiner, Leipzig (now Hamburg) that issued numerous printings)
2 [Tr. note: probably from Träume eines Geistersehers, erläuter durch Träume der Metaphysik, 1776, mentioned above]
3 KpV, 137.
4 KpV, 138.
5 KpV, 125.
6 KrV, A 815-816, B 843-844.
7 KrV, A 816, B 844.
8 KpV 121.
9 KrV 141.
10 Zubiri refers here to the well-known text that appears at the “introduction” to the lectures edited under the title Logik, published in 1800 with little critical rigor by his disciple G. B. Jäsche.