The question of the origin of the concept of God is then crucial for any account of how true and perhaps even truth-evaluable judgments about God can be made. To – – attribute the origin of the content to idiosyncratic acts of an individual subject’s cognition would be to denigrate the content of that concept. While Descartes’s solution involves positing an innate status for the concept, Kant’s response is that the only way to secure the non-arbitrariness of the concept’s content is to assign it an origin in the representational capacities of the subject, not as an innate idea but as a natural product of our rational cognitive functions. Kant’s approach involves finding an appropriate middle status for the origin of the idea of God. The idea cannot be generated in the same way that the categories are formed, i.e. in the particular context of the possible experience of spatiotemporal particulars. Moreover, the idea is not of a general rule, but is rather that of a which Kant calls the or [Urbild] image” particular thing, archetype “original (A569/B597). It also cannot be that the idea emerges as a merely arbitrarily formed concept, a hodgepodge of conceptual contents that reflect more the particular expressive capacities of the individual agent than the object itself. Kant warns against trying to express the notion of the archetype through any kind of the example: example will always sully the notion and repeated failed attempts might even “render what is good in the idea suspect by making it similar to a mere fiction”. Kant’s worry that the idea must be distinguishable from mere of the imagination” is “creatures similarly reminiscent of Cartesian complaints (A570/B598). In the Lectures on Kant expresses the more general worry that Philosophical Doctrine of Religion “we will have to take the materials for the concept of God from empirical principles and empirical knowledge.” This risks that one might be picking predicates” and “bad
The question of the origin of the concept of God is then crucial for any account of how true – and perhaps even truth-evaluable – judgments about God can be made. To attribute the origin of the content to idiosyncratic acts of an individual subject’s cognition would be to denigrate the content of that concept. While Descartes’s solution involves positing an innate status for the concept, Kant’s response is that the only way to secure the non-arbitrariness of the concept’s content is to assign it an origin in the representational capacities of the subject, not as an innate idea but as a natural product of our rational cognitive functions. Kant’s approach involves finding an appropriate middle status for the origin of the idea of God. The idea cannot be generated in the same way that the categories are formed, i.e. in the particular context of the possible experience of spatiotemporal particulars. Moreover, the idea is not of a general rule, but is rather that of a particular thing, which Kant calls the “original image” or archetype [Urbild] (A569/B597). It also cannot be that the idea emerges as a merely arbitrarily formed concept, a hodgepodge of conceptual contents that reflect more the particular expressive capacities of the individual agent than the object itself. Kant warns against trying to express the notion of the archetype through any kind of example: the example will always sully the notion and repeated failed attempts might “render even what is good in the idea suspect by making it similar to a mere fiction”. Kant’s worry that the idea must be distinguishable from mere “creatures of the imagination” is similarly reminiscent of Cartesian complaints (A570/B598). In the Lectures on Philosophical Doctrine of Religion Kant expresses the more general worry that “we will have to take the materials for the concept of God from empirical principles and empirical knowledge.” This risks that one might be picking “bad predicates” and
The_Ideal_of_Reason_Pure.docx