Kant and the Death of God

ACADEMIC PAPER

In this paper, I attempt to explore the idea that Kant ‘killed’ god – and I will do so chiefly by applying Kant’s refutations of the ontological proof to some of its most prominent instantiations through history, those of Anselm, Descartes and Spinoza.

Introduction

It is popularly thought that, in philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche killed god. With his famous proclamation, “God is dead”, stated first in The Gay Science (1882)[1] and then – as if one iteration of this earth-shattering declaration couldn’t possibly suffice – repeated in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883)[2], Nietzsche is said by many to have dealt the fatal blow to a deity that had presided, unchallenged, over earth and heavens since the early Middle Ages. This supreme being had, for centuries, obsessed the minds of theologians and philosophers, who’d made it their life’s purpose to capture his essence and prove, beyond doubt, that he existed. Many – if not most – major philosophical disquisitions from the fifth to the seventeenth centuries contain attempts at capturing his unfathomable nature. For Anselm, he is, at once, the “inaccessible light”[3], and that being “than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought”[4]. For Thomas Aquinas, he is divine perfection; the highest good and the purest truth[5]. In his fifth Meditation (1641), Descartes defines him as a “supremely perfect being”[6]; and Spinoza, in his Ethics (1677), as “a being absolutely infinite”[7]. These same thinkers were equally preoccupied with proving his existence, and deployed a number of arguments to this end, each classifiable as one (or more) of three types: ontological, cosmological and teleological. In the first, the ontological, god’s existence is proven by his very essence, which must necessarily contain the attribute of being; in the second, the cosmological, by his necessary role as the prime mover or first cause; and in the third, the teleological, by his function as designer of an otherwise incomprehensibly well-ordered natural world. According to the popular narrative we’re indulging, Nietzsche came along and, having witnessed god’s decline in the world, single-handedly ushered in his demise in philosophy. And what followed was nothing short of a nihilistic upheaval; a godless world devoid of meaning, one in which – in Dostoevsky’s phrasing “all is permitted”[8] and a radical ‘transvaluation of all values’ was desperately needed.

Though there is undoubtedly an element of truth in this, it can be argued that god’s death may have been slowly set in motion a good century earlier, by a rather unassuming perpetrator: Immanuel Kant. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant lays out a series of refutations of the proofs of the existence of god that would become infamous in philosophical circles. Using tools of speculative reason, Kant systematically dismantles all the major types of arguments in favour of the existence of a supreme being, starting with the ontological and proceeding to the cosmological and the teleological, which, he argues, ultimately depend for their efficacy on the first. He begins his assassination project by drawing attention to an all-too-human cognitive bias, which he deems responsible for much of our dialectical blunders: our irresistible and unfortunate need to devise presuppositions to justify our own conceptions[9], which we then automatically – and mistakenly – take to be true. Applied specifically to the question of the existence of god, this tendency leads reason to arrive at justifications for a necessary and supreme being through a series of logical missteps. Having established that a certain object exists, reason deduces that said object must have a necessary cause, and regresses backward to an endpoint it has convinced itself must exist, and, scrambling madly to justify this endpoint, it ascribes to it the character of the very infinite being it had set out to prove to begin with[10]. In human terms, this process is understandable and even pitiable (Kant himself has a certain amount of compassion for it); it is plain to see how, having come to be dependent on the idea of god for meaning and truth, we would then scramble frantically to find ways to legitimate him, though we have no real speculative foundations for doing so. But from a rationalistic perspective, this is an unforgiveable blunder. All reason-based arguments for the existence of god are, ultimately, false and unfounded – all “defective in the grounds upon which [they are] supported”[11]. It was perhaps Heinrich Henine who first recognised the god-killing power of Kant’s refutations. In his History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1835), Heine describes the Critique as “the sword with which deism was executed in Germany”[12] making Kant, of course, the executioner. Comparing Kant’s revolution of ideas to the storming of the Bastille, Heine makes a prophetic proclamation which has proven remarkably prescient:

I will merely assert that, since [Kant’s Critique], deism has faded in the realm of speculative reason. It will perhaps require a few centuries for this distressing death announcement to be heard everywhere – but we have been wearing our mourning clothes for a long time already. De profundis![13]

Heine was correct in all respects but one: his timeframe. The de profundis would be heard, not in a few centuries, but merely one – thanks to Nietzsche. And here, perhaps, is the solution to our first inquiry: though Nietzsche may have proclaimed the death of god, Kant may well have brought it about. In this paper, I attempt to explore this idea – the idea that Kant ‘killed’ god – and I will do so in a variety of ways: by applying Kant’s refutations of the ontological proof to some of its most prominent instantiations through history, those of Anselm, Descartes and Spinoza, and also by briefly covering two ideas both contrapuntal and complimentary to it: firstly, that it was not Kant’s intention to kill faith, but rather to preserve it; and secondly, that the rationalism of the theologians itself had, in fact, unwittingly killed god while attempting to prove his existence. 

The ontological argument

In the Transcendental Dialectic, Book II, Ch. III, Section IV of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant provides a few nuanced iterations of his argument against the ontological proof of the existence of god, but most can be reduced to a central thesis: that the “existence of a necessary being is a mere idea”[14] and, what’s more, an idea that doesn’t stand strong on the shaky foundations it was built on, and cannot, therefore, withstand the force of speculative scrutiny. Kant also dedicates two subsequent chapters to addressing and disproving the cosmological and teleological arguments, but since these depend for their validity on the ontological, I will here choose to focus exclusively on the latter. Before applying Kant’s refutation to some of the major ontological proofs in history, it will do us well to explain what is meant by an ‘ontological’ argument. As stated in the introduction, an ontological proof for the existence of god is one that attempts to argue the necessity of a supreme being from his essence alone. The basic structure of the argument may be stated as follows: since god possesses attribute X (where attribute X, generally, is his absolute perfection, infinity and/or unsurpassable greatness), it cannot be conceived that he doesn’t exist, for attribute X will not allow it, and if you attempt to conceive of his non-existence, you will fall into contradiction. Thus, god necessarily exists. Anselm is thought to be the first in history to devise a sophisticated ontological proof. For him, god was a being ‘than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought’, and his reasoning for god’s existence rested firmly on this definition. If you suppose that a being than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought exists only in thought and not also in reality, then this being you have in mind would not be a being than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought, for this being would be inferior to that being than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought that is conceived to exist both in the mind and in reality, and therefore you contradict yourself by the mere act of thinking it. God therefore necessarily exists, since contemplating him as non-existent, if you define him in Anselm’s manner, would be a logical impossibility. Descartes’ and Spinoza’s ontological arguments function in a similar way. Where, for Anselm, the idea of a non-existent being than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought is contradictory, for Descartes and Spinoza, it is the idea of, respectively, a non-existent ‘supremely perfect being’ and a non-existent ‘being absolutely infinite’. Descartes, in his fifth Meditation, states this clearly:

Certainly, the idea of God, or a supremely perfect being, is one which I find within me just as surely as the idea of any shape or number…when I concentrate more carefully, it is quite evident that existence can no more be separated from the essence of God than the fact that its three angles equal two right angles can be separated from the essence of a triangle, or than the idea of a mountain can be separated from the idea of a valley[15].

Spinoza’s ontological argument is a little more nuanced. It is the first and shortest of the three proofs he offers in Proposition XI of his Ethics. If you deny that god, or a being ‘absolutely infinite being, a substance consisting of infinite attributes’, exists, then it means that his essence does not involve existence, and this is absurd, since – as he states in Proposition VII – existence belongs to the nature of substances. The next proof he offers is the more elaborate and rests on the principle of sufficient reason. It states that, since a reason for god’s non-existence cannot be found, neither internally, that is, pertaining to his essence, or externally, that is, derived from the nature of the world, then god must necessarily exist. This is not, strictly speaking, an ontological proof – although Kant would like argue it ultimately rests on ontological bases – and so I will concentrate, in the next paragraphs, on the first proof Spinoza offers.

 The commonality, among the three ontological proofs mentioned, is that that rely on a specific conception of the essence of god for their efficacy. God necessarily exists because his nature is such that his non-existence is a logical impossibility. This is the reason why, according to Kant, both other kinds of proof necessarily depend on the ontological. The cosmological proof argues from contingency, that is, it argues a thing (like me, or the chair), which is proven to exist, must have a cause that itself exists. This cause must, in turn, have a cause of its own. Since we cannot regress to infinity – for this would be absurd and inconceivable – we must admit of a necessary first cause, a prime mover. This first cause is god. Arriving at this prime mover, you find that he has already been defined by the process, already been given an essence: the essence of an all-powerful, unconditioned being that conditions all. The ontological argument is therefore implied: an unconditioned all-conditioning being must necessarily exist; if he didn’t, there would be a contradiction. A similar line of reasoning applies to the teleological proof, which, because of its similarity to that of the cosmological proof, I do not feel it is necessary to outline.

Kant’s refutation of the ontological argument

Central to Kant’s refutation is a distinction which, however basic it may be for the experienced philosopher, is so important that it merits an explication, its simplicity notwithstanding: the distinction between concept and object. Where an object is a thing as it exists in nature – a chair, a mountain, an oxygen atom, the concept is the thought that corresponds to it – the idea of a chair, the idea of a mountain, etc. The first exists in reality (or at least, we will assume it does). The second exists merely in our mind. Though there is a correspondence between the two, they are not the same. The linchpin in Kant’s refutation of the ontological argument is his claim, many times suggested but never explicitly stated, that the great theologians of the past have, in their desire to proof god’s existence, committed the error of confusing the supreme being’s object with his concept, of attributing properties, like existence, to the object of god that belong solely to his concept. Kant makes this point in a variety of different ways. Each may at first appear to be a self-standing argument, but on closer inspection, one understands they are all but variations of a theme. Let us now examine the most salient of these variations.

A recurring motif, in both Descartes’[16] and Spinoza’s[17] ontological proofs, is the analogy of god’s necessary existence to the existential certainty of geometrical shapes. Just as the triangle, for instance, is a shape that cannot be conceived without three sides and three angles, god cannot be conceived without existence. Existence belongs to god’s essence as intimately and irrefutably as three angles belong to the triangle. To deny god’s existence would therefore be as absurd as to deny a triangle its three sides, or as to imagine it, instead, as having four. Here, Kant’s refutation is simple and devastating: both Descartes and Spinoza are treating the concept of the triangle as if it were an object. Yes, the concept of a triangle necessarily has three sides and three angles. It would be impossible to conceive of a triangle that did not possess these features, impossible to think of a four- or five-sided triangle; such an enterprise would automatically land one in contradiction. But the proposition, “it is impossible to imagine a triangle that does not have three sides and three angles” does not automatically imply that said triangle necessarily exists in reality, rather merely that if it did exist, it would necessarily have three sides and three angles. Its existence as a concept, as a shape in the mind that necessarily has three sides, does not automatically guarantee its necessary existence in reality, as an object. I might be able to conjure up, in my mind, the idea of a three-sided shape, but that doesn’t mean it exists out there in the world. Kant’s applies this argument to god. God’s existence as a concept, when it is indeed conceived by an individual, is incontrovertible. If you imagine a god who is supremely perfect in the manner of Descartes, absolutely infinite in the manner of Spinoza, or, after Anselm, so great that you cannot possibly conceive of anything greater, then it is, without question, impossible to imagine such a being without attributing to it those very qualities you use to define it. But to argue that such a being necessarily exists in reality, as an object, because he possesses those qualities as a concept, is as fallacious as saying that a triangle necessarily exists in the world because it must be conceived, in your mind, as a three-sided shape. In order to predicate god’s existence, Kant claims, we would have to be able go beyond our conception of an object,[18] which is precisely what Anselm and company fail to do. They argue from the conception of the object alone, not from the object itself. The ontological argument proves, not that god exists because of his infinite attributes, but at most, that, if he did exist, he would necessarily possess said attributes.

What is happening here, Kant would likely argue, is that Anselm, Descartes and Spinoza are committing a rather subtle error in their argumentation: they are keeping the subject while dispensing with its predicate. When you imagine a triangle without three sides, you enter into contradiction, this is true. Such a thing cannot be said to exist, for it is absurd. But this does not mean that a triangle with three sides necessarily exists. And Kant’s explanation, here, necessitates a brief grammar lesson. In the proposition “a triangle has three sides”, you have a subject (‘triangle’) and a predicate (‘has three sides’). Similarly, in the statement, “god is a supreme perfect being”, you have a subject (‘god’) and a predicate (‘is a supremely perfect being’). When Anselm et al. propose their ontological proofs, they mishandle this important division. For, if you imagine a triangle that doesn’t have three sides, what you are doing is keeping the subject of the sentence while dispensing with its predicate. Kant admits that there is a clear contradiction here. If, however, along with the predicate, you also annihilate the subject, there can be no such contradiction[19]. A four-sided triangle is absurd, but a non-existent one isn’t. Similarly, if you imagine a god that is imperfect, finite and mortal, in short one stripped of all his godlike qualities, then, yes, you will fall into the absurd; you are insisting on keeping the subject ‘god’ while doing away with all its predicates. But if, on the other hand, you throw out the subject with its predicates, and consider that there is no god at all, let alone one that is supremely perfect and absolutely infinite, then there is no contradiction; you’re home free. An imperfect and finite god is a contradiction, but a non-existent one isn’t. And so to the claim, made by Spinoza, that existence itself “belongs to the nature of substance” of god[20], Kant would likely answer that all existential propositions are synthetic rather than analytical. In other words, they add new information to the concept not originally contained in them. “The bachelor is unmarried” is an analytic proposition; the predicate “is unmarried” adds no new information to the original concept. But “the bachelor is happy” is synthetic; the predicate adds genuinely new information to the concept that is not originally encapsulated in it. Thus it is with being. “God is a supremely perfect being ” is an analytical proposition, and thus imagining a Christian god without the property of supreme perfection is contradictory. But “God exists” is synthetic; the predicate, ‘exists’ adds new information to the concept of god, which, were it removed, would produce no illogicality. Or as Kant puts it, “the predicate of existence can always be denied without contradiction”[21]. Finally, Kant argues that “being is not a real predicate”[22]. In other words, ‘existence’ is a predicate that describes the qualities of the concept of a thing, but not those of the object itself. When Anselm, Descartes and Spinoza say that god necessarily exists, therefore, they are referring to the concept of god, rather than any object in reality corresponding to it. This latter entity they cannot possibly verify, for, as we have seen, in order to predicate the existence of an object, one must go beyond the pure conception of it. In the case of sense-objects, Kant argues, this is done by connecting them to my perception by means of empirical laws[23]. But in the case of ‘objects of pure thought’, like god, this is impossible to do, since it “must be cognized a priori”[24], independently of all experience.

Kant, the unwitting assassin

Having come thus far, one may be forgiven for thinking that Kant’s intention, in setting forth his refutations, was clear-minded, focused, willful and even malicious. Kant’s accompanying internal monologue to the Critique may, in the minds of those who’ve gone no further than the refutations, appear to read: “God is a foolish superstition. I will bring the full force of my speculative powers to bear on him, and rid the world of this pernicious folly once and for all” – such is the singlemindedness and thoroughness with which he dispenses with all major proofs of the existence of god. And yet, it would seem that his was an involuntary deicide, a case of ‘godslaughter’ rather than premeditated, coldblooded murder. In the preface to the second edition of the Critique, Kant states that he decided he must “abolish knowledge in order to make room for belief[25], suggesting that his enterprise was, not an iconoclastic, but a reverent one. Far from setting out to ‘storm the Bastille’, or to play the role of god’s executioner, Kant intended, yes, to dismantle the rationalistic justifications of god’s existence, but to do so in a way not at all diminishing of any emotive or irrational desire to legitime the same. There seems to be a persistent deistic vein in Kant’s thinking that continues to validate the underlying affective needs a belief in god satisfies while, at the same time, denying any acceptable speculative path toward rationalising it. Heine describes Kant as a compassionate titan who, seeing how important religion was to the common folk, had not the heart to deny it altogether[26]. And at several points in the Critique, Kant himself validates the very proofs he then proceeds to tear asunder. In the section VI, for instance, he acknowledges the teleological argument as the oldest and most intuitive, one that, for this reason, “deserves to be mentioned with respect”[27]. Elsewhere, he states that he persists in believing in god, although his faith is more doctrinal than practical[28], and that, in spite of its shortcomings, the concept of god is remains a flawless idea.

The idea that faith is to be found somewhere ‘beyond’ reason, and that reason must be suspended in order to accommodate faith was far from a new one, even for Kant. An exultation of the irrational, in fact, accompanies the proclamations of faith of many of the church fathers. Tertullian famously uttered, “credo quia absurdum” (I believe what is absurd). Anselm, whom we have examined, similarly puts the absurd before the laws of nature when, in his Proslogion, he declares, “I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand.”[29] Thus even Anselm, who was the first to prove god’s existence on logical grounds, ultimately concedes that, for any Christian worthy of their name, faith must precede reason. For him as for Augustine and Aquinas, reason alone is insufficient for a full contemplation of god’s “inaccessible light”[30]; such a monumental enterprise must be deferred to faith. For the Medieval, reason was at best, a flawed faculty that ought to be mistrusted, and at worst, a pathway to heresy. And in Spinoza’s wake, some would come to consider reason as a sort of slippery slope to deicide, even – and perhaps especially – when deployed to the opposite effect, as a method to prove god’s existence. This is the contention precisely of Friedrich H. Jacobi, who believes that Spinozism is atheism[31], that is, that Spinoza’s pantheistic proofs can prove the existence of no more than an all-encompassing nature, a nature from which a personal god is all but excluded. Jacobi’s answer to Spinoza’s treacherous rationalistic extremism, as Boehm highlights, is a salto mortale[32], a ‘jump’ over reason into faith not dissimilar to Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, and not so distant from the medieval subordination of reason to faith.

Eagleton has said that Kant “thrust [god] beyond the bounds of reason”[33]. This is, in a sense, untrue and, in another, true. For god had been, both a rational abstraction and an absurd will-o-the-wisp at least since Anselm, a being at once dependent on reason for its existential validation, and, paradoxically, also placed far beyond it in an epistemological realm remote and amorphous. Kant’s achievement, if thus it can be described, was to forever close the first of these two pathways. In this sense, Eagleton is right, and so too is Heine. By showing us, once and for all, that reason is incapable of shining god’s inaccessible light upon us, Kant irrevocably killed god, at least as a legitimate subject of speculative reason.

[1] P. 181

[2] Part II

[3] Proslogion, Ch. 16, p. 103

[4] Ibid., Ch. 2, p. 2

[5] Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 1: On God

[6] P. 45

[7] Part I, Concerning God. Definition VI

[8] Brothers Karamazov, Book II, Ch. 6

[9] Transcendental dialectic: Book II, Chapter IIISECTION III. Of the Arguments employed by Speculative Reason in Proof of the Existence of a Supreme Being, Loc. 7005

[10] Loc. 7023

[11] Loc. 7032-59

[12] P. 78

[13]Heine, p. 86

[14] Loc. 7092

[15] P. 45

[16] Meditation V, p. 45, stated above.

[17] Ethics, prop. XI: “But the reason for the existence of a triangle or a circle does not follow from the nature of those figures, but from the order of universal nature in extension. From the latter it must follow, either that a triangle necessarily exists, or that it is impossible that it should exist. So much is self-evident. It follows therefrom that a thing necessarily exists, if no cause or reason be granted which prevents its existence. If, then, no cause or reason can be given, which prevents the existence of God, or which destroys his existence, we must certainly conclude that he necessarily does exist.”

[18] Critique of Pure Reason, loc. 7183: “Whatever be the content of our conception of an object, it is necessary to go beyond it, if we wish to predicate existence of the object.”

[19] Critique of Pure Reason, loc. 7110-28

[20] Ethics, Prop. VII

[21] Critique of Pure Reason, loc. 7156

[22] Ibid.

[23] Critique of Pure Reason, Loc. 7183

[24] Ibid.

[25] Loc. 709

[26] History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, p. 87

[27] Loc. 7425

[28] Loc. 9497

[29] Ch. 2, p. 93

[30] Anselm, Proslogion, Ch. 6, p. 103: “Truly, 0 Lord, this is the inaccessible light in which You dwell… Truly, the reason I cannot stand to look at this [light] is that it is too resplendent for me.” See also Augustine, City of God, Book XI: “But since the mind itself, though naturally capable of reason and intelligence, is disabled by besotting and inveterate vices not merely from delighting and abiding in, but even from tolerating His unchangeable light…”

[31] Jacobi, p. 153

[32] Pp. 197-9

[33] P. 35

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