AN ALMOST NEGLECTED ASPECT OF KANT'S THEOLOGY

Abstract

Kant's philosophy of God, as an issue of transcendent theoretical metaphysics, is widely known for its destructive effect. Indeed, Kant himself is definitely responsible for this negative reception; for, in his Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), 1 he spent many pages for critically arguing against the possibility of knowing anything about such a supreme highest metaphysical representation of God as an ens realissimum. Especially in the third chapter of the Transcendental Dialectic (Dialectic), titled "The Ideal of Pure Reason" (Ideal), he extensively elaborated the invalidity of all possible proofs for the existence of God. Kant's refutations of all those fallacious proofs are based on his famous principle: existence is not a real predicate (CPR A598/B626). According to this principle, existence does not belong as a reality to the omnitudo realitatis which is synthetically grounded on the ideal of pure reason. In fact, the basis of the validity of this principle has already been found in the Transcendental Analytic (Analytic), especially, in its second part titled the "Analytic of Principles". Here, where topologically preceding and hence conditioning the Dialectic, Kant has elaborated a transcendental and critical argument concerning the real use of the category of existence. Because of the fact that the category of existence figures as one of three categories of modality, it merely expresses as other two categories of modality do the mode in which the object is related to the subject (CPR A219/B266). In its real use, the category of existence can have its objective validity only if it accords with the appropriate principle of understanding which rules this real use, i.e., one of the three postulates of empirical thought (CPR A218/B265-6). On this basis, in the