▶︎ 0:00 In this lecture, what I'm going to talk about is Kant's views on notions like hope and belief, and the ways in which they interact with various aspects of his philosophy, really emphasizing the way they interact with his views in moral philosophy.
▶︎ 0:19 We've noted before that Kant has these three questions that we can look to as a frame for understanding the different aspects of Kant's philosophy and the relationship between them. The questions of what can I know? What ought I to do? And for what may I hope? And so this discussion of belief and related notions is very much part of this third question, this question of for what may I hope.
▶︎ 0:47 One view that one finds in epistemology when one's talking about what can be justified beliefs or beliefs that aren't justified, is a view that's called evidentialism. The core idea behind evidentialism is that whenever we have a belief, it needs to be the case that that belief is justified to the extent that it's supported by evidence, and that it's responsible for us to hold that belief only to the extent that the belief conforms to the evidence that we have for it.
▶︎ 1:41 There's obviously a kind of intuitive appeal to this notion of evidentialism. If I'm looking in front of me, and I'm seeing the table, and I have that perceptual evidence for the table, certainly seems reasonable for me to believe that the table's in the room. If I look in front of me and there's no table, then it wouldn't be reasonable, we might think, for me normally to claim that there's a table in the room. And so there's certainly an obvious straightforward appeal to this notion that we should believe things to the extent that we have evidential support for them, and that if we're doing something like holding onto a belief even though all the evidence is against it, that there might be something epistemically suspect about that.
▶︎ 2:30 But on the other hand, it also seems like there's various cases where we might think that people have beliefs that go beyond what the evidence strictly licenses, but where nevertheless their holding those beliefs might seem reasonable. Here's just one classic textbook case, to use as an example. Imagine that I'm running through the woods, trying to escape an attacker. And in running through the woods, I suddenly come across a large ravine. And in order to escape the attacker, I need to jump over and clear the ravine.
▶︎ 3:20 I'm not the world's greatest long jumper. Maybe I practiced some in high school on the track team, but I'm not winning any Olympic medals. And based on the evidence available to me from my career in trying to make long jumps, I would not say that the evidence provides sufficient support that I am going to be able to make the jump and clear the ravine. But the only way for me to survive is to clear the ravine.
▶︎ 4:04 If I believe that I'm able to make the jump, then that will put a little bit of an extra spring in my step, and might indeed be what makes the difference between me clearing the ravine or not clearing the ravine. If I don't believe I can clear the ravine, then maybe I'm not going to make the jump at all, and that's not going to be in my practical interest. I'm going to get beaten by this attacker. If I believe that I can make the jump, then I'll go ahead and attempt it, and indeed, it might put that extra spring in my step and let me jump a bit further than I, strictly speaking, had evidence in favor of thinking that I would be able to jump.
▶︎ 4:52 So in this case, we might think that my holding the belief that I'm going to be able to clear the ravine is reasonable. It's justified not because I have evidence, but it's justified because of the different practical implications of me holding that belief or not in the particular situation I find myself in, where I have certain practical interests at play. Some philosophers will use these kinds of cases to try to push back a bit against a really strong evidentialist view that says it's only responsible to hold a belief when that belief is in proportion to your evidence.
▶︎ 5:40 Kant seems to be somebody who is pushing back against a strict evidentialism, somebody who wants to say that there's various grounds for belief that are not evidence in any straightforward sense. But nevertheless, make it reasonable and responsible and indeed justified for people to hold certain beliefs. There's various cases that Kant gives where he thinks that it's justified to hold certain beliefs that go beyond the evidence. And these are usually divided up into the classifications of pragmatic, moral, and theoretical, and the theoretical one is oftentimes sometimes also called doctrinal, doctrinal belief.
▶︎ 6:39 What I'm going to do is I'm going to say a few words about Kant's own notion of belief, and how it relates to some other epistemic notions like knowledge or some further notions in Kant's philosophy like cognition. And then I'm going to outline these different types of belief that Kant suggests human beings can responsibly hold. And then I'm going to focus in particular on the way in which Kant's theory of belief relates to his views regarding the highest good, and the ways in which his views on the highest good lead him to claim that we should have a moral belief in God's existence and a moral belief in the immortality of the human soul.
▶︎ 7:34 What does Kant mean when he talks about the notion of belief? The German term that he's using is Glaube, and Glaube is a bit ambiguous in terms of translation. You can translate it as belief, or you can translate it as faith. And for Kant, it has both of these resonances. When talking about Kant or reading Kant and seeing notions like belief or faith, remember he's always using this term Glaube, and it's helpful oftentimes to plug both of those different translations in, in order to best make sense of the text.
▶︎ 8:10 Kant thinks that there's a general category of mental attitudes, which he refers to as types of assertion, ways of holding something for true, for wahr halten. One key type of assertion is the type known as knowledge. And Kant's German term for knowledge is Wissen. Kant thinks that in order to have knowledge, it needs to be the case that I have what he calls sufficient objective and sufficient subjective grounds for making the assertion. If I have some grounds, but they're lower, they're weaker, then I don't have knowledge. I have what he calls opinion.
▶︎ 9:30 And in some cases, my objective grounds might be so insufficient that I don't even count as having opinion. I just count as being persuaded that something is true. Kant sees all of these as on a kind of continuum. You can move from one to the other by increasing or decreasing the objective or subjective grounds that you have.
▶︎ 10:07 Kant uses the term belief a bit differently than the way that we do in everyday English. In everyday English, we might say, I believe something, and it is true, and I have sufficient warrant for that belief, and so that belief also counts as knowledge. That's a way of thinking about belief on the same spectrum or in the same general box as knowledge. But the way that Kant talks about belief, he thinks of it as a kind of assertion that's in a different category than knowledge, opinion, and persuasion.
▶︎ 10:48 In the case of belief, it's never going to be the case that we ever could have sufficient objective grounds in favor of the truth of the assertion. The assertion is always going beyond the objective grounds that are available to us and what those objective grounds we might think would seem to justify. But nevertheless, Kant thinks that belief is not something just wholly unjustified or wholly non-rational or irrational or has no support. Rather, he refers to various interests or needs of reason that he suggests can end up supporting belief.
▶︎ 12:03 Again, for Kant, belief is referring to this category of assertions where we recognize that we don't have sufficient evidence in a straightforward sense of evidence for them. And it's also not the case that we ever just could get more evidence and then come to know them. Rather, it's a type of assertion for which we recognize we don't have sufficient straightforward evidence, we'll never have sufficient straightforward evidence, but nevertheless, we take ourselves to be justified in making this assertion. So we can put a little bit more flesh on the bones of this Kantian notion of belief by looking at the different types of belief that we find in his philosophy.
▶︎ 12:58 One kind of belief that Kant talks about is something that he calls pragmatic, or we call pragmatic belief. The standard example here is the case of a doctor, where the doctor is seeing a patient who is extremely ill. The doctor is in a situation where it's impossible for the doctor to know what exact precise disease the patient has. And the doctor has to make a choice between administering a particular medicine or administering a different medicine.
▶︎ 13:48 And then you might say the doctor. Let's describe the situation further. Let's say the doctor recognizes that, if the doctor gives the right medicine, it's going to heal the patient. If the doctor gives the wrong medicine, then it might actually hasten the patient's decline.
▶︎ 14:05 Kant thinks that in this sort of situation, the doctor does not have straightforward evidence that would allow the doctor to claim to know what disease the patient is suffering from. But nevertheless, the situation is such where it's so important to act, because otherwise the patient's going to die, that the doctor needs to go ahead and come to a kind of assertion of which disease the doctor is going to go ahead and take the patient to have or claim the patient to have, so that the doctor can then decide which medicine to administer.
▶︎ 14:54 So in this case, there's this prudential, pragmatic, practical, practical in that sense, ground that we might think licenses the doctor to say, "Oh, the patient has disease A," so that the doctor can then go ahead and act by administering the medicine for disease A, because otherwise the situation's going to be hopeless for the patient. So here's one type of belief, where one's making an assertion that goes beyond the evidence available to one and where one thinks that in the circumstance it would be impossible to know what exact disease the patient was suffering from.
▶︎ 15:42 Another type of belief, and the type of belief that Kant focuses on most fully, is a notion of moral belief. Kant thinks that there's various beliefs, various assertions that the needs of morality license and justify. I'm going to talk in more detail about the two main ones, belief in immortality, in a minute. But what we're going to see is we're going to see that for Kant, the needs of morality are such that on moral grounds, we're justified in believing in the existence of God and the immortality of the human soul.
▶︎ 16:43 For Kant, in the critical period that we're talking about here, he does not think we could ever know if God exists. He doesn't think we'd ever know if the soul is immortal. Rather, one of the key features of his critical thought is to deny that we can ever have that kind of knowledge. The denial that we could ever have that kind of knowledge has oftentimes given rise to a certain picture of Kant as the all-destroying Kant who tears down all of traditional metaphysics, including aspects of metaphysics tied to traditional religious belief like God and immortality.
▶︎ 17:24 But in Kant's theory of moral belief, he articulates that even though we can't have knowledge of certain things like God, nevertheless, morality provides us with what he takes to be sufficient grounds for belief, in this case, the existence of God. So I'll lay out the details of that argument more fully in a minute, that he makes in a minute.
▶︎ 17:51 The third type of belief that we find in Kant's writings is something that he calls doctrinal belief. This is an interesting category in Kant's philosophy. It's interesting because it's a type of belief which seems to be held on the basis of the interest of theoretical reason rather than on the basis of practical reason in a straightforward sense. But it's also a notion of belief in Kant's philosophy that's maybe on a bit less of clear firm footing than the others, in that he talks about it in the Critique of Pure Reason, which he publishes in 1781. He's clearly talking about it in some subsequent writings, like what's called the Orientation Essay. But then the vocabulary of doctrinal belief, this notion of belief in relation to theoretical reason, is something that seems to drop, at least rhetorically, from his presentations.
▶︎ 19:16 And whether it just gets renamed or is being implicitly worked with or if he's actually abandoning it, is an interesting textual historical question about Kant's trajectory. But in any case, there's definitely key texts like the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant endorses this notion of doctrinal belief. And the main example that Kant likes for doctrinal belief is belief in the existence of God. Kant maintains in the Critique of Pure Reason that if a scientist is looking to study nature and is looking, for example, to study the intricate structure of a plant or an animal or is looking to study the various laws of nature governing the solar system and the cosmos more generally, that the scientist is going to be significantly aided in those studies by asserting that the universe has been created by God such that the universe exhibits a certain kind of systematic structure that can then be pursued or investigated by the scientist.
▶︎ 20:43 And indeed, in the first critique, Kant suggests that the more of this sort of structure that one finds in actually carrying out those scientific investigations of organization and systematicity in the natural world, the more one becomes convinced of this doctrinal belief in the existence of God. So there are texts where Kant is saying that we cannot know if God exists. We can't ever presume to have sufficient objective grounds in the sense of straightforward evidence for claiming that God exists. But nevertheless, the needs of our theoretical reason are such that we will be much better to satisfy the demands of theoretical reason and its search for systematicity in nature by believing that God exists and, on the basis of that belief, searching for the structure in nature.
▶︎ 21:56 And indeed, the more that we find nature conforming to what we would anticipate nature would be like given that belief, the more convinced psychologically at least we become. And so we also get this notion of doctrinal belief in Kant's writings.
▶︎ 22:16 Now although he has these various notions of belief, pragmatic belief, moral belief, doctrinal belief, the type that's most central for his overall philosophy, the type that he focuses on the most explicitly throughout his critical writings is the notion of moral belief. And so that's what I'm going to focus on primarily in this section.
▶︎ 22:46 The notion of moral belief is really important for properly understanding the initial significance and influence and reception of Kant's critical philosophy. When Kant initially published the Critique of Pure Reason, it was not widely read. It was not widely appreciated. It didn't generate initially the kind of interest that Kant had really hoped for. And one of Kant's motivations for writing one of his subsequent works, the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, was in part to try to help clarify and articulate the Critique of Pure Reason in the hope that it would help generate more readers for the Critique of Pure Reason and his philosophy itself.
▶︎ 23:45 Perhaps the Prolegomena helped a bit. But one factor that played a very large role in generating interest in Kant's critical philosophy at the time, which isn't always as fully appreciated as it should be, is a series of letters that a follower of Kant, Karl Reinhold, published in the mid-1780s. These are known as the Letters on the Kantian Philosophy from Reinhold. What Reinhold does in these letters is he positions Kant's philosophy in relation to this enormous philosophical controversy that was going on at the time, which is known as the pantheism controversy.
▶︎ 24:52 The pantheism controversy was a dispute that had emerged via a correspondence between three figures, the Berlin philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, the novelist and general man of letters, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, and then their mutual friend, Elisa Reimarus. So that's Mendelssohn, Jacobi, and Elisa Reimarus. Reimarus was friends with both Mendelssohn and Jacobi, and so the controversy started with Mendelssohn and Jacobi exchanging letters with Reimarus as the intermediary. But she was also reading and commenting on these letters as well.
▶︎ 25:57 Jacobi in his correspondence to Elisa Reimarus had asked whether Mendelssohn was aware that Mendelssohn's recently deceased friend, the Enlightenment figure G. E. Lessing, had been a Spinozist, a follower of Spinoza. Mendelssohn had been engaged in a project of trying to write a memorial to his friend Lessing's character. And so Jacobi asks Elisa Reimarus, does he know, in assessing Lessing's character, that Lessing was a Spinozist? Mendelssohn basically replies by saying, "No, I haven't heard this," and asks for more information and details from Jacobi.
▶︎ 26:41 And then they enter into a sustained correspondence in which Jacobi claims that when he had visited Lessing, Lessing had confessed to Jacobi that he had become a Spinozist, which Jacobi took to be tantamount to a declaration of atheism. Jacobi didn't think that this was simply a kind of interesting biographical tidbit about this figure Lessing. Rather, he thought that Lessing's confession of Spinozism was symptomatic of the fact that Jacobi claimed that Enlightenment rational theology inevitably culminated in what Jacobi took to be a Spinozistic atheism, the denial of a personal God, the denial of divine providence, the denial of human free will and moral responsibility. In a nutshell, what we today might call nihilism, a term that Jacobi himself actually helped introduce into the philosophical vocabulary.
▶︎ 27:53 Mendelssohn entered into the correspondence and after getting clarity from Jacobi on the exact sense in which Jacobi thought Lessing had been a Spinozist, presented various arguments against the claims that Enlightenment philosophy culminates in atheism and fatalism and the denial of providence. And instead, in the context of this controversy, publishes a book called Morning Hours, giving new proofs for the existence of a theistic God, et cetera. Unfortunately, the controversy, or at least the initial stage of the controversy, came to an end when Mendelssohn unfortunately passed away. He had left his house to deliver a manuscript to his publisher, contributing to this controversy, and unfortunately, the weather was bad. He got sick and died.
▶︎ 28:51 What Reinhold did in these letters on the Kantian philosophy is he presented Kant's critical philosophy as providing a way out of the dispute between Mendelssohn and Jacobi. Reinhold suggested that Kant's notion of moral belief would be able to get people out of the controversy in the following way. On the one hand, Kant shows that we cannot use theoretical reason to arrive at knowledge of the supersensible, including knowledge of God. And so we can neither prove that a theistic God exists nor disprove that a theistic God exists. We can neither prove that Spinoza is right nor disprove that Spinoza is right.
▶︎ 29:51 We can also neither disprove at the end of the day, that Mendelssohn's claims are right for a theistic God. We can neither prove it nor disprove it. That doesn't mean that Kant takes Mendelssohn's specific arguments for those claims to work. Rather, he questions that those arguments could get to the conclusion. But the conclusion itself that a theistic God exists, he thinks we can neither prove nor disprove. And so Jacobi is wrong to think that reason and commitment to reason is inevitably going to prove Spinozistic atheism. Mendelssohn's also wrong, though, to think that reason is ever going to prove the truth of theism.
▶︎ 30:40 So in order to settle the question that's being raised by Mendelssohn and Jacobi, we can't look to the resources of theoretical reason. We can't look to the resources of demonstrative arguments that we find in metaphysics textbooks. Rather, we should look to the demands of practical reason. We should look to the demands of morality. And what Kant argues is that on the basis of morality, we should believe in the existence of God, where God should be understood as a being who directs nature towards the realization of the highest good. And we should believe in the immortality of the human soul.
▶︎ 31:39 So in short, this is an aspect of Kant's philosophy that played a really central role in the initial reception of Kant's thought. And much of the initial interest in Kant's philosophy was generated actually by this aspect of his thought.
▶︎ 31:59 What exactly are the arguments then for moral belief in God and immortality? Kant held on to this notion, or he had this notion of the highest good for many years, including many years prior to the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason. So we can see him as having had a kind of conviction. Just conviction of this notion of the highest good. And then over his career, developing different resources for trying to find a place for this conviction within his philosophical system. And as such, we seem to find different arguments regarding the highest good over the course of his career and different ways in which the notion of the highest good is claimed to support belief in God and immortality.
▶︎ 32:56 In the Critique of Pure Reason itself, and this was the work that Reinhold had read and what he had in mind when he was writing those letters on the Kantian philosophy, we seem to find the following argument. Kant seems to claim in the Critique of Pure Reason that we know what the moral law is on the basis of reason, but we are not able to be sufficiently motivated to commit ourselves to the moral law and to obey the moral law merely by recognizing what the moral law tells us through reason. We also need to, in order to be motivated to commit ourselves and obey the moral law, need it to be the case that we will have a kind of sensible satisfaction and happiness if we obey the moral law. If obeying the moral law required us to sacrifice all happiness, all pleasure, all sensible satisfaction, then we would not be able to be motivated to follow the moral law. We seem to need some kind of promise of happiness, Kant's claiming in the Critique of Pure Reason, in order to be properly motivated to follow the moral law.
▶︎ 34:55 There is ambiguity in this position in the Critique of Pure Reason, or at least potential ambiguity. Some people interpret Kant as saying that I could never be motivated to act morally at all unless I anticipated pleasure from the action. Other people might interpret him as saying, I can sometimes act morally, but I can never fully commit myself to always acting morally or truly committing myself to the moral life unless I also think there's a promise of pleasure. Sometimes in Kant's text from shortly before the first critique, he talks about how the promise of happiness gives a further weight, weightiness to the moral law. And that might seem to suggest that there's already a bit of incentive to follow the moral law, but maybe not sufficient weight where one is able to really commit oneself fully to the moral law. Regardless, the position at this time seems to be that one needs some kind of expectation of happiness in order to properly commit oneself to the moral life, to the moral law, and to act morally.
▶︎ 36:17 And this leads Kant then to suggest that morality provides grounds for believing that we will receive happiness for following the moral law's dictates. The moral law tells us what to do. The moral law is clearly of significant importance. The only way psychologically that we can bring ourselves to obey the moral law is if we anticipate happiness and pleasure from satisfying those dictates. And so we need to believe that we will receive this happiness so that we can be properly motivated to do this really important thing, obey the moral law.
▶︎ 37:06 Well, we don't necessarily seem to have that happiness here and now. And so it seems then that we're supposed to, and so Kant says that we need to believe that we'll be able to receive this happiness even if not here and now in some kind of future life to come. And this leads Kant then to claim that morality supports belief in God, where God is seen as the guarantor of that happiness and that future life. The happiness will be provided to us by God. And a belief in immortality in the sense of a belief in a future life to come where we'll receive that happiness. There's various questions one can raise regarding this argument or issues about its details.
▶︎ 37:58 But I'm not going to get into those here, and the reason is that most commentators think that Kant rejected this argument, that he put forward this argument in the Critique of Pure Reason, because he wanted to find a way to get the highest good into his philosophy. But when he subsequently wrote the groundwork, he revised his theory of moral motivation in really significant ways where he could no longer endorse that earlier argument and instead had to abandon it and develop some new way of fitting the highest good into his philosophy.
▶︎ 38:43 The key change that commentators typically point to is Kant's view in the groundwork that we should not be performing our duty for the sake of receiving pleasure or for the sake of obtaining happiness. Rather, we should be performing our duty merely out of respect for the moral law. We should be performing duty for duty's sake. And so commentators typically take this notion from the groundwork to contradict the earlier theory of moral motivation from the first critique and to provide Kant with good reasons for rejecting that earlier argument.
▶︎ 39:28 Well, if he rejects that earlier argument for the highest good, he needs a new one. So what's the new argument supposed to be?
▶︎ 39:37 The subsequent text in which Kant next gives a really extended presentation of the highest good is the second critique, the Critique of Practical Reason. This is published in 1788. And when people talk about Kant's theory of the highest good, this is usually the text that they have in mind. It's like the paradigm text for discussions of the highest good, even though Kant talks about the highest good in a bunch of places and, as we've already seen, in some varying different ways.
▶︎ 40:10 In the second critique, what Kant does is he says that from a rational perspective, from the perspective of moral reason, any rational being should recognize that somebody who has acted virtuously has acted in a way where they are worthy of happiness. The villain who acts immorally all the time has acted in ways where that person does not seem to be worthy of happiness. They rather seem to have made themselves unworthy of happiness. But somebody who has acted morally has acted in a way where we recognize that they are worthy of happiness. And so, we recognize that if we had the power to make somebody happy who was worthy of happiness, then that's something that would be incumbent upon us, something to be done. Any rational being with the power to do so would give the virtuous person happiness.
▶︎ 41:26 Kant takes this to translate to the notion that the moral law demands the realization of the highest good. The moral law demands that people who are worthy of happiness because they've acted virtuously receive happiness in proportion to their worthiness of it. And indeed, Kant thinks that because this is a moral demand and we're moral beings, it's a moral demand on us that we ourselves should be doing what we can to aim to further the highest good, to aim to further this condition where people receive the happiness that they merit.
▶︎ 42:11 It would be highly irrational for us to try in any way to pursue the highest good or highly out of reason for morality to demand the realization of the highest good if that realization was impossible, if it was impossible for the highest good to come about or be realized. And so what Kant does then is he enters into an analysis of what exactly the highest good is and why we need to believe in the existence of God and immortality in order to be able to believe in the possibility of the highest good. So for Kant, as we've noted, the highest good has two elements: virtue and happiness.
▶︎ 43:13 In this context, Kant criticizes two ancient ethical theories, or at least his understanding of two ancient ethical theories, that he thinks misunderstand the relationship between virtue and happiness. On the one hand, he talks about the Epicureans. He thinks that the Epicureans say that virtue is simply the means for arriving at happiness. What counts as a virtuous action or a virtuous life is just the action or life that facilitates happiness. Kant dismisses the Epicurean standpoint. He thinks that he has shown no, no, no, no, no. What makes something a moral action is not that it's a means for happiness per se. What makes it a moral action is that it's an action performed out of respect for the moral law.
▶︎ 44:03 And then he talks about the Stoics, and he takes the Stoics to argue that happiness just is virtue. In other words, what it is to be happy is to be virtuous and to recognize oneself as virtuous and have this kind of satisfaction and the recognition of one's virtue. And here, Kant says, "No, no, no, no, no. Virtue and happiness are two different things. Virtue is something that comes from acting out of respect for the moral law. Happiness is something that comes from the world being in accordance with our wishes and wills, such that our desires are satisfied."
▶︎ 44:48 And so the Epicureans and the Stoics are both wrong. They overly conflate virtue and happiness in different ways, but they're both wrong in doing so. We need to sharply distinguish virtue and happiness. And we need to recognize as such that in the natural world around us, it doesn't seem like there's any obvious natural connection between virtue and happiness.
▶︎ 45:19 Kant's suggestion seems to be that both the Epicureans and the Stoics are trying to get a kind of natural connection between virtue and happiness. If you make yourself virtuous, then of the nature of being virtuous, you'll be happy, or, virtue just is a means in the natural world for the achievement of happiness. So Kant says, "No, no, no. Virtue and happiness are split, and in being split, there's no obvious natural connection between them where you can easily move naturally between, from one to the other between them."
▶︎ 45:55 Indeed, if you look at the world around you, it might seem that nature is totally indifferent to the provision of happiness in proportion to virtue, that natural laws just sort of go their own way, spin out different natural events, and that we don't have evidence of any kind in the natural world in favor of the idea that virtuous people are somehow going to be receiving happiness in proportion to their virtue.
▶︎ 46:28 But we know that Kant is rejecting a kind of straightforward evidentialism. And so what Kant maintains here is that we should, on moral grounds, have a kind of belief that even though the world might seem morally indifferent, that somehow, some way in the long run of things, nature will be such that people ultimately receive the happiness that they merit. And in order for us to believe that nature is that way, then we need to adopt two further beliefs. First, we need to believe that there is some being, namely God, who has created nature such that nature, again, in the long run of things in some way that's not readily obvious to us, is directed towards the highest good in such a way that human beings will ultimately receive happiness in proportion to their virtue.
▶︎ 47:39 And then we also, Kant says here, need to believe that perfect virtue is not something that any of us are able to achieve in our finite lifespans, but we should believe that we're immortal so that beyond the finite lifespan in which we find ourselves here, we can continue in the long run of things to asymptotically approach perfect virtue. So we should picture ourselves as immortal so that there will be this infinite expanse in which we can always be perfecting ourselves and, in the limit, achieving perfect virtue. So on these grounds, Kant claims that morality justifies belief in God and belief in immortality.
▶︎ 48:35 You might wonder about a third notion in Kant, freedom. Sometimes people say that for Kant we have belief in freedom, God, and immortality. But there's various texts where Kant actually makes a stronger claim for freedom, where he claims that we have a kind of practical knowledge of our own free will. And there's, as you might imagine, some debate about how exactly to understand this notion of practical knowledge and why we have practical knowledge of freedom, but just belief for God and immortality.
▶︎ 49:13 One potential interpretation is to say that Kant thinks that we immediately recognize, he calls it a fact of reason, immediately recognize that we're morally obligated. And then we reason that the only way we can be morally obligated is because we have free will. And so we have this really direct argument from this fact of reason to the claim that we have free will. And perhaps that is why he claims that we count as having a practical knowledge, a knowledge on practical grounds, a knowledge on the grounds of our awareness of moral obligation to ascribe free will to ourselves, and he calls it knowledge.
▶︎ 49:56 But I'll leave aside this kind of further question about what might be a distinction between moral belief and moral knowledge in this case. In any case, Kant makes this argument that we should believe in the existence of God and in the existence of immortality so that we can believe in the possibility of the highest good. Now, there's a number of
▶︎ 50:21 There are questions, obviously, that one can raise about the details of this argument for Kant. So, for example, in the case of immortality, one might say, is there a bit of an incoherence, Kant, in your argument? You're claiming on the one hand that we need to believe that the realization of perfect virtue is possible. And then you're claiming that if we were immortal, we would be able to become perfectly virtuous within that infinite expanse, that in the limit we would become perfectly virtuous.
▶︎ 51:01 But does that really, does that talk of in the limit or that notion of infinite expanse really make the realization of perfect virtue possible? Is it not rather the case that, at any given stage in the asymptotic approach, you haven't yet gotten there? You might think that the limit is something that you continually approach and approach and approach, but you don't arrive at it. How exactly are we supposed to use this notion of the infinite expanse to say that perfect virtue is possible rather than just this more limited claim that perfect virtue is something that we can always get closer and closer and closer to without ever actually reaching?
▶︎ 51:48 Hegel seems to make a version of this criticism in the Phenomenology of Spirit in a section called "The Moral Worldview."
▶︎ 51:55 In the case of belief in God, there's similar questions that one can raise, even if one is generally sympathetic to Kant's notion that morality can license belief in ways that go beyond what we strictly speaking have evidence for. Kant says that God would be the ground of nature being directed in such a way that people would be provided with happiness. And the type of God that Kant seems to have in mind is a fairly traditional theistic conception of God as received or influenced by the Christian tradition in which Kant himself was raised.
▶︎ 52:42 But one might very well wonder why would that type of God need to exist in order to be doling out happiness in proportion to virtue? Even if one maintained that Kant had a point that we should believe that people receive happiness for their virtue, why couldn't that be grounded on, for example, some sort of non-theistic karmic principle? Why would you need the theistic God that was part of the religious tradition Kant himself happened to be raised in as the guarantor of this happiness? Why not instead think that there could be any type of non-theistic ground or principle, non-theistic karmic type principle that would be able to account for the relationship between virtue and happiness instead?
▶︎ 53:38 Now, I think on the one hand that this is a significant problem for Kant's position here and an issue that it'd be good if he had said a bit more to himself try to address. But nevertheless, it does seem to me that there's some resources in Kant's philosophy indeed that might be already at work in the second critique's discussion of the highest good that might get him a bit closer to the position that he's aiming to articulate.
▶︎ 54:18 And in particular, what I have in mind are Kant's discussions regarding the notion of symbolism. Kant maintains that for supersensible things like God, things that he says we represent as ideas of reason, we cannot have knowledge of them, can't know if they exist. We can't know in any meaningful, substantive way what they're like, even if they do exist. But nevertheless, when Kant talks about various supersensible items that might exist or that we should believe exist, he oftentimes claims that we need to find a way to represent these supersensible, alleged supersensible objects to ourselves in ways that are sufficiently comprehensible to us for our purposes, including our moral purposes. And Kant thinks that the way in which we can represent supersensible entities to ourselves in ways that provide us with a sufficient grasp on our notions of these objects, where those ideas can serve their purposes, is on the basis of analogies and symbols.
▶︎ 56:02 Kant maintains that one thing can be a symbol of another when there is a kind of identity of relations. He gives the example of using a hand mill. So you have a mill that you're turning a crank on and it's grinding up the grain. So a hand mill, as a symbol of a perfectly despotic state. Nobody in human history has ever had the misfortune of experiencing a perfectly despotic state, maximally despotic state. There have been bad states, no doubt, but Kant doesn't think that there was ever a case where somebody was experiencing a state that was perfectly despotic, as despotic as possible.
▶︎ 57:00 So for Kant, the notion of a perfectly despotic state, a maximally despotic state, is an idea of reason. It's something we can entertain, but it's not something of which we actually have experience. We might, however, want to get a handle, a kind of grip, grasp on what a perfectly despotic state would be like. And Kant thinks that recognizing the relationship between the ruler in a perfectly despotic state and the citizens of that state, recognizing that that relationship would be akin to the relationship between the person moving the handle and all the grain getting ground up, is such that we can use the hand mill of which we do have a lot of experience, or at least Kant in his time and place had a lot of experience with these hand mills. And we can use our experience of the hand mill in order to get a better grasp on what a perfectly despotic state would be like.
▶︎ 58:09 In the context of the highest good, the kind of symbolism that's important, for Kant, is going to be symbolism related to God. So a kind of notion of divine analogy. And what Kant oftentimes says in this context is that, if God exists, the relationship between God and the world would be similar to the relationship between a human mind and an artifact, like a human artisan and an artifact. And so Kant maintains that we can provide ourselves with a conception of how God, whatever God might actually be like, would be able to stand in a relation to the world such that the world is directed towards the highest good by utilizing the analogy of a human artisan producing an artifact to symbolically represent God as just the supersensible ground of nature to ourselves in terms of a human artisan, creating the world for a specific purpose or creating the world as intended towards a particular kind of outcome or direction.
▶︎ 1:00:12 That's in no way supposed to amount to a knowledge claim. We don't know that God is an artisan. Indeed, Kant emphasizes that this notion of a human artisan is something that we would be improper in claiming was literally true of God. God, if God exists, would be an infinite being. Our notion of a human artisan is the notion of a kind of limited mind. It wouldn't be the kind of mind that God himself would truly possess. But nevertheless, this notion of the human artisan can provide us with a kind of grasp on the kind of relationship that God has to the world.
▶︎ 1:01:00 And so we might then see Kant wanting to reply to this particular worry about could there be a non-theistic karmic principle accounting for the highest good by saying something like, yeah, there could be. Indeed, maybe morally speaking, I'm not licensed in believing anything beyond the notion that the supersensible somehow grounds nature in a way that is directed towards the highest good. But I also need a way of making the relationship between the supersensible and nature graspable to myself such that I have sufficient comprehension or grasp of the relation that I can make it sufficiently intelligible to myself. And that thinking of the ground in terms of a mind directing nature, thinking of that mind on analogy with a human artisan provides me with that further grasp via this symbol.
▶︎ 1:02:15 Now, one can obviously have a variety of views about the particular force of Kant's arguments for the highest good or for belief in God or regarding this notion of divine symbolism. But one thing that I think is a more general point that we can draw from this, independent of those specific arguments, is this emphasis in Kant that we're seeing here on the notion that we need various symbols, various representations drawn from sensibility, even for representing ideas of reason.
▶︎ 1:02:56 For Kant, when we're operating with ideas of reason, you could get the impression that these are things that are beyond experience. They have no relationship at all to experience. If we're operating with ideas of reason, we're just operating in total abstraction. And Kant's own view seems to be quite different. Kant's own view seems to be no, no, no. Even with ideas of reason, we need to find ways to make the content of those ideas something that we're better able to get a handle on or grasp. And the way to do that is through various kinds of symbolic presentations.
▶︎ 1:03:35 Presentations that we find in this particular context, but that Kant thinks we find in many other contexts as well. And so this general emphasis on the importance of symbols in human life, the fact that we oftentimes need symbols to grasp things of which we don't have direct experience, the notion that we're ultimately tied to a need for these kinds of symbols seems to me to be something interesting, potentially productive in Kant's philosophy that hasn't always gotten the emphasis or stress that one might think it deserves.