“I Think; Therefore I. Kant”

.

.

           “I Think; Therefore I. Kant”

. . . Kant argues from the facts of our moral experience, facts which we cannot

deny except at the risk of the extinction of human civilization itself, to belief in

the existence of the God of theism.

                    James Walter Gustafson, The Quest for Truth

.

An Apostle’s Legal Defense

“Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian!” [1]  King Herod Agrippa had practically ruled in favor of the defense over against the false charges of the Jewish prosecution.  Paul’s reply to Herod: “I would to God, that not only thou, but also all that hear me this day, were both almost, and altogether such as I am, except these bonds” [2]  strikingly illustrated what the renowned philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), called the “Categorical Imperative.”  In Kantian terms, the apostle had effectively willed his maxim, the “law of faith,” [3]  to become a universal law!  And soon that “law of faith” would be published throughout the Roman Empire.  Indeed God had decreed such universality before Paul willed it. [4]

Herod concluded that Paul had done nothing deserving of death or imprisonment noting to Governor Festus that “this man could have been set free had he not appealed to Caesar.” [5]  The book of Acts concludes with Paul in Rome, having commandeered the survival of the ship’s passengers during shipwreck, and still in chains, but living at his own expense, freely proclaiming the “kingdom of God.” [6]  Soon Paul would report to the church in  Philippi,

I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ. [7]

Clearly there was no disqualifying motive of self-interest here! [8]

The Summum Bonum

Immanuel Kant reasoned that every “ought” implied a “can,” but that in order for good to triumph there had to be a moral being of sufficient power to subdue injustice. The summum bonum [highest good], which Kant identified as “the union of virtue and happiness,” was “possible in the world” only “on the supposition of a Supreme Being having a causality corresponding to moral character.”

Now, in as much as it is a duty for us to promote the summum bonum, it is not merely allowable but a duty to presuppose the possibility of this summum bonum.  And so, as this is possible only on the condition of the existence of God, it is morally necessary, it is a matter of duty, to assume the existence of God. [9]

The preaching of the “gospel of the kingdom” is God’s appointed means for the promotion of the summum bonum.  In his Dissertation On the End for Which God Created the World, and his twin dissertation entitled The Nature of True Virtue, America’s first philosopher, Jonathan Edwards (1803-1858), defined the summum bonum in terms of the manifestation of the glory of God, God’s self glorification based upon the mutual love of the persons of the triune Godhead for one another.  For Edwards, true virtue was simply “consent to being.” [10]

To determine then, what proportion of regard is to be allotted to the Creator, and all his creatures taken together, both must be as it were put in the balance; the Supreme Being, with all in him that is great and excellent, is to be compared with all that is to be found in the whole creation: and according as the former is found to outweigh, in such proportion is he to have a greater share of regard.  And in this case, . . . the whole system of created beings, in comparison of the Creator, would be found as the light dust of the balance, or even as nothing and vanity. [11]

Any ethical system, therefore, that did not take into account this assessment, based upon Isaiah 40:12-17, would constitute bankrupt morality–less than nothing.  Kant, as noted earlier, would predicate the existence of God on ethical grounds, i.e., upon moral necessity, whereas Edwards had predicated ethics on ontological grounds, i.e., upon the existence of God.

Foundation and Reward

Kant associated reward with self-interest, and thereby excluded it from his Categorical Imperative.  The apostle Paul, the former Saul of Tarsus, though he spoke of his reward, interpreted his reward as the privilege of self-sacrifice for the summum bonum:

What is my reward then? Verily that when I preach the gospel, I may make the gospel of Christ without charge, that I abuse not my power in the gospel.  For though I be free from all men, yet have I made myself servant unto all, that I might gain the more. [12]

Paul could hardly overrule the fact that God is “a rewarder of them who diligently seek him”! [13]   Clearly, however, the concept of reward was not the foundation of Paul’s ministry.  The  foundation in Paul’s life was established by God’s loving Saul of Tarsus even when he was persecuting God’s church. [14]  God interrupted Saul by turning his life motive upside down, enabling Saul to love God in and of himself, that is, disinterestedly, [15] and only then would Saul be prepared to champion God’s church which he once sought to destroy.  Paul the apostle later wrote Romans 11:36 “For of him and through him and to him are all things: to whom be the glory forever. Amen.”

Conscious of this metaphysical [16] reality, Jonathan Edwards was careful to distinguish  disinterest from uninterest:

Indeed the saints rejoice in their interest in God, and that Christ is theirs; and so they have great reason: but this is not the first spring of their joy.  They first rejoice in God as glorious and excellent in himself, and then secondarily rejoice in it, that so excellent a God is theirs. . . . But that which is the saints’ superstructure is the hypocrite’s foundation. [17]

After that “first spring,” Christians experience the blessing of extending God’s love to others– even including their enemies. [18]

The First Order of Things [Metaphysics]

Jonathan Edwards’s “first objective ground of gracious affections,” no less than Kant’s Categorical Imperative, ruled out the concept of “reward” or “self-interest” as the primary basis for ethics.  Both Kant and Edwards were speaking in metaphysical terms which concern the first order of things.  Kant’s Categorical Imperative, an indictment upon the state church of his day, [19] simply transposed into eighteenth century philosophical terms what Jesus of Nazareth had stated in first century Hebraic terms:

Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets (Matt. 7:12; Luke 6:31).

Kant held that “morality is not properly the doctrine [of] how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.” [20]  Will Durant summed up Kant’s Categorical Imperative as follows;

. . . an action is good not because it has good results, or because it is wise, but because it is done in obedience to this inner sense of duty, this moral law that does not come from our personal experience, but legislates imperiously and à priori for all our behavior, past, present, and future.  The only thing unqualifiedly good in this world is a good will–the will to follow the moral law, regardless of profit or loss for ourselves.  Never mind your happiness; do your duty. [21]

Millennia before Kant articulated his Categorical Imperative, or Edwards ruled out self-interest from the “first objective ground of gracious affections,” [22] God Himself had taken on  Satan’s maligning of Job’s motives as to whether Job’s obedience was calculated solely on the basis of self-interest. [23]  In retrospect, God’s purpose in allowing Satan to work havoc with Job and his family was to prove the integrity of Job’s faith over against Satan’s slanderous charge of ulterior motives and the criticism of Job’s friends.  The issue raised by John Piper’s so-called “Christian Hedonism,” therefore, is at least as ancient as the book of Job.

Heartless Willing?

By identifying with Ayn Rand’s satirical quotation, [24] Piper seems to be insinuating that Kant’s Categorical Imperative, by very definition, was categorically heartless. Piper apparently    overlooked Jonathan Edwards’s argument that self-love could be reduced to a man’s “loving what he loves” which may be nothing more than “a man’s having a faculty of will.” [25]  A heartless willing is no willing at all!  This is no argument for “Christian Hedonism,” however, but only a morally neutral comment concerning the nature of the human will which, as Edwards well stated, could be inclined toward good or evil. [26]  Kant, as noted earlier, saw it as every man’s duty to promote “the union of virtue and happiness”–hardly a “heartless” endeavor!

But Edwards also observed that what is commonly called “self-love” refers to “a man’s regard to his confined private self, or love to himself with respect to his private interest.” [27] Clearly, it was this “regard to the confined private self” rather than the “faculty of the will” to which Kant stood opposed in ruling out reward or self-interest in the Categorical Imperative.

The “faculty of the will,” however, finds maximum expression when the “maxim”  is that standard identified by the Son of that God who alone has the power to unite virtue and happiness on a world-wide scale:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself. [28]

And now we have come full circle, for this is one and the same with, and indeed it hinges upon, Paul’s “law of faith,” that “faith which worketh by love,” i.e. the gospel itself. [29]

.

End Notes

 [1]. Acts 26:28

[2]. Acts 26:29

[3]. Rom. 3:27

[4]. Isaiah 2:1-3; Micah 5:2; Psalm 19:4; Hab. 2:14; Rom. 10:18; Col. 1:23

[5]. Acts 26:32

[6]. Acts 27:9-44; 28:16-31

[7]. Phil 1:12-13

[8]. In setting forth his famous Categorical Imperative, Immanuel Kant ruled out the concept of reward or self-interest.

[9]. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Part I, Book II, Chapter II, cited by James Walter Gustafson, The Quest for Truth: Introduction to Philosophy, pp. 62-63

[10]. David C. Brand, Profile of the Last Puritan: Jonathan Edwards, Self-Love, and the Dawn of the Beatific, pp. 59-60

[11]. Jonathan Edwards, The End for Which God Created the World, Works, 1:98

[12]. 1 Cor. 9:18-19

[13]. Heb. 11:6b

[14]. 1 Cor. 15:9  In Galatians 1:15 Paul traced God operative grace to his mother’s womb.

[15]. Acts 9:16

[16]. Metaphysics, coined by Aristotle, literally means “after physics,” and refers to the study of first principles: ontology, the nature of being; cosmology, the origin of the world; and epistemology, the theory of knowledge.

[17]. Edwards 1879, 1:277

[18]. Matt. 5:38-48

[19]. Will Durant alludes to the state church’s displeasure with Kant’s à priori approach in The Story of Philosophy, p. 208.

[20]. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, p. 31, quoted by Will Durant in The Story of Philosophy, p. 209.  Compare Matthew 3:8.

[21]. The Story of Philosophy, p. 209

[22]. Jonathan Edwards, Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, III, II

[23]. Job 1:9-11

[24]. Ayn Rand was credited by John Piper as having penned the following caricature of Kant’s Categorical Imperative: “An action is moral, said Kant, only if one has no desire to perform it, but performs it out of a sense of duty and derives no benefit from it of any sort, neither material nor spiritual. A benefit destroys the moral value of an action. (Thus if one has no desire to be evil, one cannot be good; if one has, one can.)”

http://www.desiringgod.org/resource/christian-hedonism

[25]. Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue, Works, 1:130

[26]. See Edwards’s treatise on the Freedom of the Will.

[27]. Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue, Works, 1:130

[28]. Luke 10:27

[29]. Gal. 5:6

.

Sources

 Brand, David C. 1991. Profile of the Last Puritan: Jonathan Edwards, Self-Love, and the Dawn of the Beatific. The American Academy of Religion. Academy Series. Edited by Susan Thistlethwaite. Atlanta: Scholars Press

Durant, Will. n.d. The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Great Philosophers of the Western World. New York: A Touchstone Book Published by Simon and Schuster.

Edwards, Jonathan. 1879. The works of Jonathan Edwards, A.M., rev. & ed., Edward Hickman, 2 vols. 12^th edition. London: William Tegg & Co.

Gustafson, James Walter. 1992 [1998] The Quest for Truth: an Introduction to Philosophy. Fourth Edition. Needham Heights, Massachusetts: Simon & Schuster Custom Publishing

Holy Bible. 1611. King James Version. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers.

http://www.desiringgod.org/resource/christian-hedonism

Kant, Immanuel. 1909. “Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals,” in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics, translated by T. K. Abbott, Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd., London reproduced in Samueal Enoch Stumpf’s Philosophical Problems: Selected Readings in Ethics, Religion, Political Philosophy, Epistemology, and Metaphysics. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company. 1971.

Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language. 1962. College Edition.  Cleveland: The World Publishing Company.

.

About the Writer

David Clark Brand is a retired pastor and educator with missionary experience in Korea and Arizona. He and his wife now reside in Wooster, Ohio, where they first met at a Presbyterian youth conference. They have four grown children and seven grandchildren. With a B.A. in the Liberal Arts, an M. Div., and a Th.M. in Church History, Dave continues to enjoy study and writing. One of his books, a contextual study of the life and thought of Jonathan Edwards, was published by the American Academy of Religion via Scholars Press in Atlanta.