IDEA 43
The Most Awesome Possible Experience
DIVISION POSSIBLE ACCORDING TO THE SUBJECTIVE RELATION OF THOSE WHO BIND UNDER OBLIGATIONS, AND THOSE WHO ARE BOUND UNDER OBLIGATIONS: 1. The juridical relation of man to beings who have neither right nor duty: Vacat. [i.e., It is null] There is no such relation, for such beings are irrational, and they neither put us under obligation, nor can we be put under obligation by them. 2. The juridical relation of man to beings who have both rights and duties: Adest. [i.e., It exists] There is such a relation, for it is the relation of men to men. 3. The juridical relation of man to beings who have only duties and no rights: Vacat. There is no such relation, for such beings would be men without juridical personality, as slaves of bondsmen. 4. The juridical relation of man to a being who has only rights and no duties (God): Vacat. There is no such relation in mere philosophy, because such a being is not an object of possible experience. [Immanuel Kant: General Divisions of the Metaphysic of Morals]
Being the brilliant, meticulous philosopher that he is, Kant knows very well that his system is too tidy and disciplined to accommodate The Vastness that is GOD. Despite more than a century of modern theorizing (from Descartes’ time or earlier), “God” still loomed too large in the minds of Europeans to ignore. So Kant found a place for that particular item of divinity in his system. But it would disturb too much of that system for Kant to imagine giving God His infinite due. And so we have this cold, deadening conclusion, that philosophy (Kant’s philosophy) cannot accommodate a relation between man and God “because such a being is not an object of possible experience.”
Some might think that “mere philosophy,” particularly of the dry, Kantian type, honestly has no room for God (or GOD, namely the One Absolute, Incomprehensible Reality our hearts were made to yearn for), and that theology is His proper abode. This is an error. Muslim philosophers such as Ibni Sina, Al-Ghazzali, and Mulla Sadra constantly engaged with the idea of GOD as a concept relevant to all other concepts in the philosophical lexicon. Or perhaps we could say that their theology was so broad that it included philosophy in the classical sense as one part of their inspired range of interests.
Notice also, in the quote above, that all beings other than “men” are deemed “irrational” (i.e., not belonging to 2., 3., or 4.) and “they neither put us under obligation, nor can we be put under obligation by them.” Are newborn infants irrational? Do they not put us under obligation, despite their being irrational? Or, if they are rational in some sense, do we extend that rationality to dogs, cats, dolphins, crows, chimpanzees, elephants, and countless other creatures that show clear signs of more consciousness and personality than newborn infants? If we meet these animals, in the wild, in zoos or protected spaces, or as pets, do we owe them no concern whatsoever? And what about the Earth, or the environment in general?
This is not meant as trivial quibbling or fault-finding. It is a sign of what “mere philosophy” of the Kantian type does to our capacity for honest perception and experience. And it reminds us of how devastating our theories can be to the openness we need to be whole human beings — people who may not have the exact word or an apposite concept for an experience, but who feel the Hand of GOD as an indefinable immanence in our affairs, or who feel their need for a transcendent Justice.
Experience is not limited to what the mind can grasp or put a name to. But the mind can at least recognize the possibility of experiences that we are not yet ready for, but for which our current experiences are preparing us. This, I believe, is why the Qur’an so often describes the pains and pleasures of the Everafter in considerable detail. It is as if GOD is telling us to get rid of our presumptuousness of judging reality by what we can measure or conceive and expand our capacity to trust … and that trust will be our new faculty in the world to come, a type of perception with its own dimensions, objects, and modes of knowledge.
By shutting out God as impossible to experience, Kant — and so many thinkers like him — has shut himself into a box where systems like his make complete sense. To be fair, Kant did recognize (and categorize) the realm he called noumena, namely things in themselves, which he deemed unknowable. (This, of course, begs the question as to how he defined knowledge.) He started to work out reasons why we needed God and immortality, but these half-hearted attempts were never central to his main philosophical work or his reputation today as one of the world’s greatest philosophers.
GOD is one of those “objects” that the modern world, like Kant, generally dismisses as unknowable and thus not worth discussing. If we have no relation with it, there is no interest in it. Imagine our surprise when, on the day when all our feelings, concepts, and judgements are judged, we find that GOD has always had a relation with us, which we spurned, and that we suddenly discover what duties to Him we had been neglecting for no good reason.
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