The Metaphysics of Thinking Necessary Existence: Kant and the Ontological Argument

Abstract

I argue in my paper that, when the “twofold standpoint,” in terms of which Kant undertakes to set metaphysics upon the revolutionary path of critical reason, is truly assessed, we discover that the fundamental distinction that he makes between subject and object, between thinking (together with desiring and willing) and knowing, between thinking the thing in itself and knowing objects of possible experience, or between freedom and nature, recapitulates the ontological argument demonstrating the necessary relationship between thought and existence.

Notes

I want to thank Mark Cauchi, Christopher Irwin, Mohamed Khimji, Avron Kulak, Joan Steigerwald, and Terry Walker for providing me with critical responses to my paper.

1. All citations of Kant are taken from the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) with “cognize”/“cognition” changed to “know”/“knowledge.” Emphasis is in the original.

2. Kant, “Mirage,” in Critique of Pure Reason.

3. See Preface to Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd ed., Bxvi.

4. See the section of Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript entitled “Subjective Truth, Inwardness; Truth is Subjectivity,” trans. H. H. Hong and E. H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), vol. 1, 189–251.

5. The commentary on Kant, both philosophical and scholarly, is vast. It will suffice here to indicate that authors of two recent studies, the first concentrating on Kant (and Hume) and the second making Kant the foundational thinker of modernity, fail to appreciate what is truly revolutionary in his thinking: Paul Guyer, Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); and David Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

6. See St. Anselm, Monologium and Proslogium, in The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

7. See Heiko Augustinus Oberman, The Harvest of Late Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).

8. Descartes writes (in the person of Eudoxus) in The Search for Truth: “you must … begin to see that if you simply know how to make proper use of your own doubt, you can use it to deduce facts which are known with complete certainty—facts which are even more certain and more useful than those which we commonly build upon that great principle [i.e. the law of non-contradiction] … namely, ‘It is impossible that one and the same thing should exist and at the same time not exist.’” In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 415–16

9. See Psalms 14 and 53.

10. “Consciousness knows something … ” G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 55.

11. St. Augustine, City of God, 11.26.

12. Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Donald A. Cress (Hackett, IN: Indianapolis, 1980), 2.

13. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. by H. H. and E. H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 13–14.

14. See “First Set of Replies” and “Fourth Set of Replies” (to the “Objections to the Meditations”), in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, op. cit., 78–79, 165ff, esp. 169.

15. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (seventh paragraph from the end). Emphasis is in the original.

16. Aristotle adheres to this logic in all his major works, e.g. Posterior Analytics, Nichomachean Ethics, and Metaphysics.

17. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B285.