metonymy4u

Kant is famous for the notion that he felt it necessary to destroy reason in order to make room for faith. But what sort of faith was it? I believe it was the faith that turned God on its head, making God the transcendental concept that we require for our more common sense of practical reason, which is the distinction between morality vs. prudence. In this way, God is no longer center stage, reason is. So in fact it was the other way around: Kant destroyed faith in order to make room for reason. This conclusion depends in part on one’s idea of Kant’s understanding of his own method. For there is a some deal of debate still among contemporary professional philosophers as to whether Kant thought his transcendental method could grant access to the noumenal world. Indeed, it is a tantalizing question: why speak of a noumenal world at all if one believes one cannot access it in some way (even if only through synthetic a priori judgments)? It’s like the paradox of the sentences that deny their own truth. Do they say anything at all?

I happen to think that Kant very well understood his own method and, along with Hume, was very much a metaphysical iconoclast (destroyer of rationalism). Kierkegaard understood this very well I believe, which is why he re-presented the story of Abraham, the Kantian hero par excellence . The story of teleological suspension of the ethical is the story of a real, living, phenomenal world bound human being in whom we appreciate the abandonment suffered by those who live with Kant’s critical idealism. If Abraham’s categorical imperative was to put no other principles above the commandments of his God, then how can we understand the very real suffering a person experiences in the dialectic of competing de-mands? God sent him a son and then de-manded it back? What madness!? This is only a problem for a being who lives without ultimate certainty: without access to the noumenal. A being with access to the noumenal would never have suffered on the way to Mount Moriah. So torture, suffering, doubt, loneliness – all of these are the conditions associated with our ability to distinguish goodness from prudence. And this can only be so for a being without access to absolute truth. At the same time, truth cannot be said to be completely relative either, for this would be itself another absolute truth which could obviate our suffering. Our suffering is our truth, nothing more and nothing less. That is the koan of human being.