Ronald nash faith and reason

Philosophy Book Summary

Chapter Eleven

Epistemology II: A Tale of Two Systems

I t is impossible to cover more than a small portion of the history of epis-temology between the time of Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and the pre- sent. Descartes represented a version of the rationalism defined at the end of chapter 3: "Some human knowledge does not arise from sense experi- ence." He was a French Roman Catholic of modest religious convictions, though the existence of God did play a central role in The Meditations. Two other rationalists are worthy of mention, even though their beliefs, like those of Descartes, cannot be explored. The parents of Baruch Spin- oza (1632-1677) were Pottuguese Jews who fled persecution in Spain and moved to Amsterdam, where their son was born. Spinoza was expelled from the synagogue of Amsterdam for heretical beliefs, including panthe- ism. The third famous Continental rationalist of the seventeenth century was Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), a German Protestant.

Historians of philosophy typically contrast these three European ratio- nalists with three eighteenth-century British empiricists, namely, the Eng- lishman John Locke (1632-1704), 1 the Irishman George Berkeley (1685- 1753), 2 and the Scotsman David Hume (1711-1776). These six were then followed by the German thinker Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), whose work is sometimes misleadingly represented as a synthesis of rationalism and empiricism.

All of these systems are worthy of careful study, but not in this text. I have time only to take a brief look at some central ideas of Hume as preparation for a slightly more detailed examination of the epistemology of Kant. I will draw attention to several significant implications of Kant's work and raise several challenges. In chapter 12, I will jump ahead to our own time and examine the content of a system known as Reformed

1. With Locke's death in 1704, it is obvious that the label of eighteenth-century empiri- cism stretches things a bit, since all of Locke's major works were written in the seventeenth century.

2. George Berkeley was a bishop in the Anglican church. He was the only important philosopher to visit America before 1900. He came hoping to start a missionary training college for the evangelization of the Indian tribes of New England.

EPISTEMOLOGY II: A TALE OF TWO SYSTEMS

epistemology. This latter view has links to a Scottish thinker named Thomas Reid (1710-1796), the great Reformed theologian John Calvin (1509-1564), and before him, Augustine (354-430).

However, before the theories of Hume, Kant, Reid, and others begin zooming past your eyes, I must include an introductory section that will acquaint you with a few major topics and problems raised by thinkers before Hume and Kant.

The Theory of Ideas

During the seventeenth centwy, many philosophers accepted the basic premise of a position known as the theory of ideas. The first step into the theory of ideas involves assent to the claim that the immediate objects of human knowledge are ideas that exist in the mind. In other words, when I perceive a brown table on the other side of the room, what I am immediately conscious of is not the table but an idea of the table. While the table presumably exists outside my mind, exists in the external world, the idea of the table exists in my mind. Most people make this distinction and also believe that the idea of the table in the mind is caused somehow by the table itself.3

The Problem of the External World In ways too complex to explore here, the existence of that real chair and all of the other furniture of the so-called external world (the world sup- posedly existing outside of our minds) became problematic, so much so that some philosophers felt obliged to produce arguments proving that the world outside our minds does exist when no human is perceiving it. This problem of the external world will occur in somewhat different forms in the positions of Hume, Kant, and Reformed epistemology.

The Problem of Other Minds Philosophers became puzzled by the question of how we might ever know that persons other than ourselves have minds. Look at some other person now; if you're alone, you might have to turn on the television. What you perceive is a human body moving in familiar ways and uttering sounds and appearing to respond to other human bodies. But we never see the other

3. John Locke went on to distinguish between primaty qualities that exist as a part of the table outside my mind (such as size and shape) and secondary qualities that are not a part of external objects but exist in the mind (such as color, taste, and smell). George Berkeley rejected the distinction between primary and secondary qualities and argued that everything humans regard as a physical and material object is a collection of ideas exist- ing in human minds and primarily in the mind of God. These are fascinating subjects, but I do not have time to explore them. Check out a good history of philosophy book.

Some Philosophical Background to Hume and Kant

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person's mind. Of course, our relationship with our own mind (thoughts, itnages, other items of which we are conscious) seems both itnmediate and undeniable. My awareness of the brown table is mediated by other things; . I do not perceive the table itself immediately. But my awareness of my mind's idea of that table is direct and itnmediate. While I find it possible to doubt the existence of the table (I might be dreaming or hallucinating), it is itnpossible to doubt my awareness of my idea of the table.

So it is easy to believe that I have or I am a mind. But how do I know that you have a mind? Lots of philosophers offered lots of arguments in an attempt to prove that other people have minds. But their arguments failed. 4

O ver a period of centuries, the failed efforts of many philosophers laid bare numerous weaknesses of empiricism. The belief that all human knowledge arises from sense experience proved inadequate to explain many important human ideas, including the concept of Equality itself (see Plato), the notion of oneness (see Augustine), the idea of infinite space (Locke), and causality (Hume). And finally, for now, empiricism cannot explain the many instances of necessary truth that humans can know. Once people commit themselves to the claim that all human knowledge arises from sense experience, the inability to carry this out with respect even to one idea is fatal. If humans can have as little as one idea that does not arise from sense experience, empiricism is proven false and the moderate type of rationalism explained in chapter 3 is true.

The writings of David Hume (1711-1776) are a watershed in the his-tOty of philosophy. Born in Scotland, Hume was and still is perceived as an agnostic or atheist whose anti-Christian views led to his being denied a university professorship in Scotland. Hume's grave in Edinburgh is worth a visit by any traveler to this fascinating city.

Much of Hume's notoriety among Christians results from a less than careful reading of his works . Hume is commonly believed to have attacked the foundations of Christianity, such as the existence of God, personal survival after death, and miracles. It is tme that Hume's personal beliefs did not mirror the orthodox Calvinism that surrounded him in his early youth. Nevertheless, what Hume intended in his writings is often quite removed from what his interpreters have thought.

There are three common misconceptions about Hume's philosophy. (1) Hume denied the reality of causal relations, that there is ever a nec- essary connection between that prior event we call a cause and the sub- sequent event we call its effect. (2) Hume rejected the existence of what

4. For an excellent review of such attempts, see Alvin Plantinga, God and Other Minds (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967).

EPISTEMOLOGY II: A TALE OF TWO SYSTEMS

philosophers call the external world; that is, he doubted the existence of a real world outside of his mind. (3) Hume doubted the existence of what philosophers call the self, that is, the real I, the foundation of a person's identity through tirne.s These three erroneous claims make up what might be called the philosophical package. What led to their promulgation has a bearing on one of Hume's key teachings.

The philosophical package came to be attributed to Hume because of the writings of two of his fellow Scotsmen, Thomas Reid and James Beattie.6 In later years, philosophers came to believe that Hume's enterprise was quite different from what Reid and Beattie envisaged. According to Hume, every- one holds to a number of beliefs around which most other beliefs, individ- ual actions, and social institutions turn. These pivotal beliefs include the reality of causal relations (that some things can and do cause changes in other things), the reality of the external world (that the existence of the world does not depend upon its being perceived), and the continuing existence of the knowing self. Hume had no quarrel with these beliefs; it would be fun- damentally foolish, he held, to doubt them. What most concerned Hume was how these beliefs come to be known. Hume showed that neither reason nor experience is sufficient to ground a knowledge of these matters. But there is no other way for them to be known. Therefore, if these pivotal beliefs can- not be known by reason and expelience, they cannot be known at all.

It was at this point that Hume's critic Beattie presumably made a mis- take. Beattie wrongly concluded that Hume denied these pivotal beliefs. Hume really denied that there is any sense in which we can be said to know these things. But this is a far cry from saying that we should doubt them. We must continue to believe them, since the consequences of not believing are too absurd to contemplate. And no one has to force or per- suade us to believe them; believing them is the natural thing to do. With this last observation we begin to approach Hume's basic point: Hume tried to show that most of our pivotal beliefs about reality are matters that human reason is powerless to prove or support.

5. This notion also goes by another name, that of a continuing self. If we consider the mind or self of a person at the time of birth and again at the time of death, it is easy to believe that individual is the same person at his death that he was at his birth. One argu- ment for a continuing self is that the notion of reward or punishment after death makes no sense unless the person receiving the reward or punishment is the same individual who perfomed the original actions.

6. Beattie's major work in this area was his Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, first published in Edinburgh in 1770. Thomas Reid is by far the more significant philosopher of the two. Worth consulting is his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, first published in 1786 and reprinted several times. Some contemporary philosophers con- tend that Reid's handling of Hume's philosophy is misunderstood. And even if Reid's cri- tique of Hume were flawed, it would not detract from Reid's own positive contribution to the theory of knowledge.

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Hume's Gap Hume was doing two things. First, he was attacking the supremacy of human reason, one of the cardinal tenets of the Enlightenment, by seeking to show that human reason has definite limits. (I leave it to the reader to decide if Hume, who died in 1776, was a postmodernist.) All who attempt to extend reason beyond its limits become involved in absurdities and con- tradictions and become prone to the disease of skepticism.? Philosophers have been too optimistic in assessing the claims of human reason, Hume believed. Most of the important things we think we know are not known at all. That is, they have not been arrived at on the basis of reasoning, and they are not supported by experience .

Hume's second point was that these pivotal beliefs rest on something other than reason and experience, namely, on instinct, habit, and cus- tom. Some nonrational inner force compels us to accept these pivotal beliefs. In his writings on ethics also, Hume argued that moral judgments rest not on reason but on nonrational human nature. In ethics, as in meta- physics and religion, human reason is and ought to be the slave of human passions, that is, our nonrational nature.8 This is tantamount to the claim that we cannot have knowledge about the transcendent. This axiom is the foundation of what I call Hume's gap.

If Hume was a skeptic, then he was not one in Beattie's sense of the word. Hume did not doubt the existence of the external world. As Hume saw it, this kind of skepticism is absurd because it contradicts common sense and violates our natural instinct to believe (against all reasoning) in certain propositions.9 Nature, instinct, and common sense all lead us to believe in an external world. According to Hume, we should ignore the arguments of the rationalists and trust our instincts. He believed that inves- tigation ought to be limited to areas such as mathematics where knowl- edge is possible. Speculative knowledge claims about certain topics in metaphysics, theology, and ethics should be avoided.10 Such matters should be accepted on the basis of Hume's type of faith, not knowledge.

7. As I show later in this chapter, this conviction was also a fundamental thesis of Kant. The claim that there are more similarities between Hume and Kant than meet the eye is argued by Lewis White Beck in "A Prussian Hume and a Scottish Kant, " in McGill Hume Studies, ed. David Fate Norton et al. (San Diego, Calif.: Austin Hill Press, 1979), 63-78.

8. Hume's well-known statement about reason being the slave of the passions appears in his Treatise on Human Nature, 2.3.

9. The possibility that Hume's position was essentia lly the same as that advanced by the Scottish Common Sense philosophers Reid and Beattie is examined by David Fate Norton in "Hume and His Scottish Critics," in McGill Hume Studies, ed. David Fate Norton et al. (San Diego, Calif.: Austin Hill Press, 1979), 309-24.

10. This is what Hume meant in the famous conclusion to his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. "When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school [scholas-

EPISTEMOLOGY II: A TALE OF TWO SYSTEMS

Hume's Religious Beliefs It is sometimes thought that Hume was an atheist, that he attempted to prove that God does not exist, and that he argued that miracles are impos- sible. To be sure, Hume was not a Christian in the New Testament sense of the word. He did not believe in miracles, which is, however, some- thing different from trying to prove them impossible. He did not person- ally believe in special revelation, immortality, or religious duties like prayer. But he was not an atheist; he did not attempt to prove the nonex- istence of God. 11 And he never argued that miracles are impossible. Hume's famous attack on miracles amounts to the assertion that no one could ever reasonably believe that a miracle had occurred. 12

Hume believed in the existence of a divine mind that was in some unknown way responsible for the order of the universe .13 Hume was both shocked and amused by the dogmatic atheism of the French philosophes whose views represented the French Enlightenment. What this means is that we have a leader of the Scottish Enlightenment attacking the leaders of the French Enlightenment for their unacceptable use of reason in deny- ing the existence of God. Does this make Hume a postmodernist? This information supports my claim in chapter 10 that contemporary post- modernists have misrepresented the view of reason held during the Enlightenment. Hume's point was that we cannot have any knowledge about God. But it is natural to have faith that God exists. In fact, the same nature that compels us to hold the pivotal beliefs mentioned earlier leads us to believe in the existence of God. But nature does not compel us to go beyond this basic belief in God's existence and accept the theological claims added by conservative Christians. Those theological claims must be rejected because they go beyond the limits of human knowledge. To argue, as many Christians do, that reason can prove the existence of God is to exceed the bounds of human knowledge, Hume believed.

tic] metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concern- ing quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental1·easoning concerning mai- lers of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistty and illusion. "

11. I am aware of Hume's arguments against traditional theistic proofs such as the cos- mological and teleological arguments. But at the end of his Dialogues Concerning Nat- ural Religion, in which Hume's objections to theistic proofs appear, Hume appears to affirm his belief in God's existence. See Ronald H. Nash, Faith and Reason (Grand Rapids: Zon- dervan, 1988), chaps. 9-10.

12. See Nash, Faith and Reason, chap. 16. 13. Consider the following quote from Hume's Natural History of Religion in The Philo-

sophical Works of David Hume (London, 1874-1875), 4, 309: "The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, sus- pend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine theism and Religion." In this connection, section 12 of Hume's Dialogues should be studied. Students of Hume's thought know how difficult it is to reconcile everything Hume says in this work.

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Some Christians no doubt have overestimated the ability of human reason with respect to proofs about God's existence. I have no desire to attempt to defend that use of reason. (See this book's chapters 13 and 14 about the existence of God.) More serious, however, is Hume's denial of the possibility of any knowledge about God in general and the possibil- ity of revealed knowledge. In these respects also, Hume can sound like a postmodernist or at least a forerunner of postmodernism.

To summarize, Hume's goal in his discussions of religion was the same as his objective in philosophy: he wished to show that reason is power- less to convert anyone to the claims of faith. "To be a philosophical scep- tic, " he wrote, "is the first and most essential step towards being a sound believing Christian. "14 German religious thinker]. G. Hamann (1730-1788) believed that Hume's skepticism could be a godsend for Christianity .IS Liv- ing in the same German city as Immanuel Kant, Konigsberg, he translated Hume's Dialogues into German, hoping it would lead rationalists16 like Kant to see the light and move toward accepting a more traditional view of the Christian faith. It is unclear whether Hamann recognized that Hume's own preference seems to have been for a nonrational faith in a god unsupported by reason, revelation, miracles, or evidence of any kind.

Given this background, the nature of what I earlier called Hume's gap can now be identified. Hume's gap is the rejection of the possibility of a rational knowledge of God and objective religious truth. Hume grounded humankind's belief in God in our nonrational nature. Hume was a precursor of those philosophers and theologians who insist that religious faith must be divorced from knowledge and who believe that the impossibility of knowledge about God will in some way enhance faith. Like Kant, as we'll see, Hume was engaged in denying knowledge in order to make room for faith, a nonrational and unbiblical kind of faith. To both Hume and Kant, knowledge and faith have nothing in common. The arrogance of rational religion (the Enlightenment? modernity?) must be destroyed so that faith (a nonrational faith) can assume its proper place as the only legitimate ground of religion.

14. The quotation comes from the conclusion to section 12 of Hume's Dialogues Con- cerning Natural Religion.

15. Hamann is an interesting but little known person. Born in Konigsberg, East Prus- sia , he came under the influence of the kind of Enlightenment rationalism we have noted earlier. At the age of twenty-eight, while working in London, he had a profound religious experience that led to his abandonment of Enlightenment theories. His life was not always a consistent testimony to Christian practice. The Christianity toward which he hoped to influence thinkers like Kant was at least closer to the historic faith than that found in the writings of Kant.

16. Keep in mind that "rationalist" has several meanings. I use it here in the sense of a person who elevates human reasoning above the Scriptures and teachings of the historic Christian faith.

EPISTEMOLOGY II: A TALE OF TWO SYSTEMS

Hume's gap appears prominently in the thought of many modern thinkers. The contemporary eclipse of God can be seen in Jean-Paul Sartre's "silence of God," in Martin Heidegger's "absence of God," in Paul Tillich's "non-being of god," and finally in radical theology's assertion of "the death of God." Paul 's sermon to the philosophers on Mars Hill (Acts 17) concerning worship of the unknown god is all too relevant to the contemporaty theological scene. Liberal Protestant theology for the past two centuries is a chronicle of futile attempts to retain respectability for religious faith while denying religion any right to revealed truth. Ironi- cally, this is precisely where almost all of the postmodern religionists of the current generation also can be found. In radical theologian Tillich's version of Hume's thesis , all that is left of Christianity is a religion that is neither objective, rational, miraculous, supernatural, nor even per- sonal. About the only thing that liberal , neoliberal and postconservative thinkers can agree about is that God has not spoken and, indeed, can- not speak.

One trademark of theological liberalism for the past seventy years is a reduction of faith to "courageous ignorance. "17 Many contemporary spokespeople for the historic Christian faith have shamefully ceased defending God's objective communication of truth. Hume's gap has affected their thinking to the extent that many now ignore or deempha- size the cognitive dimension of divine revelation.

The most obvious consequence of Hume's gap is a minimal theism. Once Hume's stance is adopted, New Testament Christianity, with its proclamation of a divine Christ whose death and resurrection secured redemption from sin and gave hope beyond the grave, must be replaced with a religion that talks about how good it feels to have an experience with a god about whom nothing definite can be known. The legacy of Hume's gap undermines the Christian faith not by denying it but by directing our attention away from the importance of its knowledge claims and its truth content. Postmodern Christians owe much to that legacy. With friends like that, the Christian faith has no need for any enemies.

I mmanuel Kant (1724-1804) is justly counted among the most important and influential thinkers in the history of philosophy. Early in his philo- sophical career, Kant had been trained in a kind of sterile German ratio- nalism that denigrated the role of sense experience in human knowledge. All of this changed when Kant encountered the system of Hume. As Kant wrote, "I openly confess my recollection of David Hume was the very thing which many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic [rationalist]

17. See Carl F. H. Henry, "Justification by Ignorance: A Neo-Protestant Motif?" journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 13 (1970) : 13.

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slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a quite new direction. "18 Kant thought that Hume's work contained a spark which, if fanned, could ignite a revolution in philosophy. Kant ventured to suggest that perhaps even Hume himself did not fully see the implica- tions of his attack on metaphysics, understood here to mean the use of human reason to solve some of the deepest mysteries of the universe.

Kant's Copernican Revolution Kant's theory of knowledge is often described as a Copernican revolution in philosophy. Just as Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) had revolution- ized the model of the solar system by placing the sun instead of the earth at its center, so Kant's theory of knowledge produced a similar upheaval in philosophy. Philosophers prior to Kant, or so Kant claimed, had assumed that human knowledge is possible only as the mind is adapted to the world. Kant reversed this order. 19 Instead of the mind adapting to the supposed objects of its knowledge, all objects are adapted to the knowing mind. The universal and necessary features of reality are known to be features of reality by virtue of their first being characteristics of the human mind that seeks to know. The rationality (that is, the universality and necessity) that human beings find in nature is there because the human mind puts it there.

Form and Content Let us forget Kant and philosophy for a moment and imagine ourselves in the serene surroundings of an old American farmhouse in the 1940s or 1950s. Let us imagine ourselves browsing through the pantry off the kitchen. Our eyes are drawn to the scores of glass containers full of home- made fruit preserves: strawberry, grape, blueberry, and peach. There 's not a store-bought jar of jelly in the house. The jars in which the pre- serves are contained come in all sizes and shapes; the jars differ in their form. And as we've seen, the glass jars contain different content. Hold those images briefly while we return to Kant's system.

18. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1950), 8. Kant's relation to Hume's thought is a subject of much controversy. A good overview of this debate can be found in Beck's "A Prussian Hume and a Scottish Kant," in McGill Hume Studies.

19. In Kant's words, "Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must con- form to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing some- thing in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge. " Kant, Introduction, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, 2d ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965).

EPISTEMOLOGY II: A TALE OF TWO SYSTEMS

Kant sought to go beyond both rationalism and empiricism by mak- ing human knowledge a composite of two factors, form and content. The content of human knowledge is given by sense experience. In fact, all human knowledge begins with sense experience. This is an important point, to which we will return. It is also a mistake, making it necessary, as we will see, to place Kant in the empiricist camp. Having made this point, however, Kant goes on to say the following: "Although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience. "20 What Kant means21 is that while sense experience is nec- essary for human knowledge in that no one would have any knowledge without it, sense experience is not a sufficient condition for knowledge. Something else (a form or structure) must be added to the content sup- plied by the senses. Unless the content is given form or structure by the human mind, knowledge would be unattainable .

Let us return to that marvelous country pantry. It is easy to see the role that both the fruit preserves and their containers play. As attractive as the glass jars (our analogue for Kant's form) might be by themselves, their real value lies in their service as containers for those precious pre- serves (our analogue for Kant's content). As you stand before the shelves of preserves (in your imagination, of course), imagine that you have the power, by snapping your fingers, to make the glass jars disappear, leav- ing nothing but the preserves. If that were to happen, the preserves would suddenly become a massive inconvenience as they slowly oozed and dripped their way from shelf to shelf to the pantry floor.22 I don't know many people who would rejoice at the sight of that mess. My point is this: Whether the subject is epistemology or preserves, both form and content are necessary.

Kant's Sausage Machine Using our imagination, let's proceed with a different example. When I was ten years old, I remember visiting my grandmother's house on East 32nd Street in Cleveland, Ohio, on days when she attached a metal sausage grinder to her kitchen table, pressed cuts of fresh meat into the grinder, and turned the handle. Out of the nozzles of that meat grinder came ground beef or pork. A bit of reflection on this example can help us get a better grasp on important details of Kant's theory of knowledge. In the following

20. Ibid. 21. For any deconstructionists who happen to be eavesdropping, I'm interpreting and

explaining the meaning of a text. Even though deconstructionists claim this task cannot be done, I'm doing it. This is textual analysis.

22. Were Plotinus to be in the pantry at the time, he might see this as an example of the downward path of oozing.

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diagram, I use the rough analogy of something like a sausage machine to illustrate the operations of the human mind in Kant's system.

Space

Percepts

Forms of Sensibility

Time

Percepts

Categories of the Understanding

Concepts

·In the case of a sausage machine, the nozzle at the top is the device by which the cuts of meat enter the machine. In the case of Kant's pic- ture of the human mind, there are two nozzles that he calls the forms of sensibility. The forms of sensibility were Kant's way of explaining two of the most puzzling problems of philosophy. For centuries prior to Kant, philosophers struggled to explain human knowledge of space and time. We need not concern ourselves with those earlier answers. By calling space and time the forms of sensibility, Kant was denying that space and time exist independently of the human mind and are somehow perceived or apprehended outside the mind. Instead, Kant argued, the notions of space and time are added to our perceptions by the mind. Everything that we perceive (sense experience) appears to us as though it were in space and time.

Most readers remember seeing the movie Superman starring Christo- pher Reeve. Dressed in his Superman costume, Mr. Reeve appeared to be flying when in reality23 he was hanging from steel wires in front of a green background. The movie technicians superimposed the visions of clouds and sky on the green background in such a way to make it appear that he was flying. In a similar way, Kant maintained, the human mind superimposes the notions of space and time upon all of our sense per- ceptions, so that they appear to us as though they were in space and time when they are not. (This might be a good time to reread the brief section of this chapter titled "Kant's Copernican Revolution.") The center of the epistemological universe is not reality but the mind. The world appears

23. Keep in mind how antirealist postmodernists deny the difference between the action on the movie screen and the reality of an actor suspended by wires.

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the way it does not because that's the way it is but because the world is a construct of our mind. For most postmodernists, Kant and his philoso- phy were an essential part of the modern world. But think a bit. When Kant teaches that the world as we believe it to be is a construct of the human mind, is he a modernist or a postmodernist? How much of what postmodernists tell us about modernity is accurate?

Moving down my diagram brings us to the pa1ts of the machine that turn those cuts of beef into mincemeat. Entering the box of Kant's sausage machine brings us to what he called the categories of the understanding. We first encountered the word category in our chapter on Aristotle, who used the word to refer to basically different ways humans think about things. Kant talked about twelve categories by means of which the human mind shapes, influences, and affects the raw material of human knowledge tl1at comes via sense experience. What enters the human mind through the forms of sensibility, what Kant calls percepts, is never an object of knowledge at that time. Human consciousness of the objects of knowledge only begins once the categories of the human understanding have added form or structure to the sensible content. (Remember the glass jars and the preserves?)

Kant's twelve categories were his way of dealing with twelve puz- zling types of human knowledge. Consider several examples encountered earlier in this book. Think of Plato's account of how human beings know that two things are similar or equal, of Augustine's explanation of one- ness , of Locke's failed attempt to explain the idea of infinite space, and of Hume's analysis of causation. For Kant, humans think in such terms because our minds force us to.

Percepts and Concepts In one of his better-known statements, Kant says: "Concepts without per- cepts are empty; percepts without concepts are blind. " For Kant, the word concept functions here as a name for what the categories of the under- standing produce. Percept is another name for the raw material of human knowledge, the sense information that enters the mind through the forms of sensibility.

For one final time, let us return to our country pantry. Imagine that the fruit preserves represent sense information, the raw material of human knowledge. Suppose that the glass jars represent the categories of the understanding or what we are now calling concepts. Unless the content (the preserves or percepts) is given form or structure (the jars or the cate-

r gories) by the human mind, knowledge is impossible. To amplify on Kant's famous statement, concepts (the form supplied by the categories) witl1out percepts (the content supplied by the senses) are empty. Remove the pre- serves from the container and all you have is an empty jar. Percepts without concepts are blind. Take away the glass jars and you've nothing but a mess

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of oozing sugar syrup and pieces of fruit. Take away the categories and all you have is a collection of colors, sounds, and smells that add up to noth- ing. Human knowledge, then, has two necessary conditions: the form sup- plied by the mind (otherwise known as the categories) and the content supplied by the senses. But neither condition is sufficient by itself to pro- duce knowledge.

One more analogy may wrap things up, at least to this point. Many years ago, I used to have a safety deposit box in a small bank in Ken- tucky. In the back, the bank had a coin-counting machine. One day I watched a bank employee pour a large bag of coins into the machine and turn on the electric motor. In no time at all, the machine sorted out the pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters, deposited each in a different bag, and calculated the total value of the coins. Always the philosopher, I said to myself, Tbere 's another example of Kant's picture of the human mind. The unsorted coins represent the percepts, the raw material of knowledge. The gears inside of the machine represent the categories of the under- standing. Just as that machine sorted out the different coins, so the mind functions as a manifold that places our percepts into appropriate cate- gories and produces the class concepts that advance the knowing process.

Summary Knowledge, for Kant, is a compound of the impressions received through the senses and that which our inborn faculty of knowledge supplies. Humans possess an a priori24 rational structure of the mind (the cate- gories) that organizes sense data or precepts. Kant sought to avoid the tra- ditional difficulties of empiricism, especially as they came to light in the thought of Hume. For example, Hume showed that empiricism cannot justify any judgment of the form x causes y. Kant argued that our knowl- edge that x causes y is a result of our mind necessarily disposing us to think in terms of causation. Likewise our knowledge of space and time is not derived from numerous particular experiences. Rather, each and every sensory experience presupposes a knowledge of space and time.

Kant's Two Worlds Since all human knowledge must be mediated by the categories of the human understanding, humans cannot know anything that is not so medi- ated. The unfortunate consequence of this claim, however, is a radical disjunction between the world as it appears to us (the world modified by the categories of our understanding) and the world as it is. According to Kant, human knowledge never brings us into contact with the real world, what he called the noumenal world. Since our knowledge is always per-

24. The term a priori refers to that which is independent of sense experience.

EPISTEMOLOGY II: A TALE OF TWO SYSTEMS

ceptually modified by the a priori categories of the mind, the real or noumenal world is not only unknown but also unknowable. Since Kant's categories operate only in the phenomenal world, one could not possi- bly know of a thing-in-itself in the noumenal world.

Hume had his gap; Kant had his wall. Kant's system had the effect of erecting a wall between the world as it appears to us and the world as it is. Human knowledge is restricted to the phenomenal world, the world of appearance, the world shaped by the structure of the knowing mind. Knowledge of any reality beyond the wall, which includes the world of things in themselves, is forever unattainable. Human reason can never pen- etrate the secrets of ultimate reality (noumenal world) . Answers to the most basic questions of theology and metaphysics lie beyond the boundaries of human knowledge. Kant's epistemology creates the possibility that the real world (the world of things-in-themselves) may be quite different from the world that appears to us (the phenomenal world). Since God is not a sub- ject of experience and since the human categories cannot be extended to transcendent reality, Kant's God is both unknown and unknowable. When- ever human reason attempts to penetrate beyond Kant's wall, either in a search for knowledge about God or in a quest for answers to ultimate ques- tions, it becomes involved in antinomies or contradictions.

Ironically, Kant thought his agnosticism with respect to God was an aid to the Christian faith. He wrote that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith."25 While they had come to their destination by different routes, Hume and Kant arrived at nearly the same point. For both Hume and Kant, faith and knowledge have nothing in common. Every time human reason attempts to leap across Hume's gap or tries to break through Kant's wall separating the phe- nomenal and noumenal worlds (as speculative metaphysics and theology seek to do), reason becomes bogged down in contradictions. Human rea- son cannot penetrate the secrets of ultimate reality. The most basic ques- tions of metaphysics and theology are questions to which human reason can find no answers, not even from God. Hume's gap and Kant's wall represent the limits beyond which human reason cannot go;26 they imply, among other things, that human knowledge about God is impossible.

In Kant's system of thought, God does have a role to play. Even though God was one of the unknowables, Kant managed to slip God through the back door as a necessaty postulate required to salvage morality. For Kant, the existence of God was entirely a matter of faith, to which Kant gave a distinctively practical twist. The Christian should abandon any knowledge

25. Kant, The Critique of Pure reason, 29. 26. There is an important difference between Hume and Kant on this point. While

Hume regarded faith as nonrational because it was based on custom or instinct, Kant believed that faith could be grounded in practical reason.

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PART TWO: IMPORTANT PROBLEMS IN PHILOSOPHY

claims about the transcendent and take refuge in a faith grounded not in theoretical but on moral and practical considerations.

Comme nts, Criticis ms, and Questions (1) Many believe that Kant's epistemology was a synthesis of rationalism and empiricism. After all , they point out, Kant stresses the importance of both percepts and concepts. Is this not a way to merge the most impor- tant elements of reason and experience? I'm afraid not. Keep in mind that Kant clearly states that all human knowledge begins with sense experi- ence. This claim identifies Kant as an empiricist. Kant's belief that per- cepts are a necessary condition for human knowledge is highly problematic and a telltale sign that Kant is an empiricist. A genuine ratio- nalist insists there can be genuine and reliable intellectual intuitions, that is, intuitions not dependent on prior sense experience. One example of such an intellectual intuition would be our knowledge of our own exis- tence. If one instance of intellectual intuition exists, the door is open to the possibility of others.

(2) Kant insisted that it is impossible for the categories of the under- standing, including the category of causation, to be applied beyond his wall to the world of things-in-themselves. But he also believed that those pesky, unknowable things-in-themselves existing in the noumenal world are the ultimate cause of our percepts. This is a flagrant contradiction in which Kant does what he says cannot be done, namely, take one of the cat- egories and extend beyond his wall into the world of things-in-themselves.

(3) Any theory of knowledge that tells us that the real world is unknown and unknowable is close enough to skepticism to make any thinking person shudder. Keep in mind my earlier warning that any belief that implies a false belief must be false. In chapter 8 I explained why skepticism is a logically self-defeating theory. Since skepticism is false , any theory that entails skepticism must also be false . This is enough to dash the hopes of any followers of Kant's epistemology.

(4) Reflect a bit on Kant's insistence that every human being pos- sesses the same set of categories. What is his explanation for this aston- ishing piece of information? When we search through Kant's writings, we encounter an even more incredible situation. Kant never offers an answer to this question. In fact , Kant never raises the question. Is there some explanation for Kant's silence on this issue? There is . Assume, for the sake of argument, that every human as a matter of fact possesses the same structure of rationality. What hypothesis best explains this remarkable state of affairs? No theory of evolution yet known to humanity will do. If such a state of affairs were the effect of a nonpurposeful collocation of nonrational forces, we would have to stand in the presence of a truly astounding coincidence.

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