Abstract
The chapter responds to Gordon Graham’s aesthetic argument for the existence of God as presented in his essay “Nature, Kant, and God”. Drawing on Kant’s moral argument, Graham argues that it is a necessary presupposition of man’s intuition about the intrinsic value of nature – its “magnificence” – to assume a divine being as the guarantor of the ultimate harmony between “useless” nature and human welfare. In this response I will, first, highlight some differences between Kant’s and Graham’s uses of the terms “aesthetic ideas,” “genius” and “the sublime.” Second, with reference to Kant’s interpretation of the figure of the goddess Isis, I will highlight a tension in Kant’s view of nature that, I suggest, also underlies Graham’s premises. This tension consists of (and assumes) a basic conflict between, on the one hand, a sense of awe and respect for nature’s mystery and otherness and, on the other, a need and desire to grasp and utilize it. I will argue that this tension is rooted in a dichotomous model of nature that fails to acknowledge that humans are themselves part of nature and, together with nature, part of a larger multi-dimensional order of creation. I will draw on Reformed philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd’s critique of Kant to show how an emphasis on the Creator-creation distinction and the multi-dimensionality of the order of reality can reconceive “magnificence” as an aesthetic dimension. This conception allows for a broadening of the conception of human welfare to include the need for aesthetic contemplation and experience.
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Notes
- 1.
For a detailed discussion of aesthetic ideas in nature see Chapters 10–12 in Henry E. Allison, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, 219–301, 2001.
- 2.
For Kant’s view of the difference between beauty and the sublime see I. Kant, trans. Werner Pluhar, Critique of judgment, 72 and 125.) Kant even argues that there is no place for emotion in the experience of beauty but only in the experience of the sublime.
- 3.
Graham, following Paul Guyer & Eric Matthews’ translation, uses the adjective “rich in sense” as a translation of the German word “sinnreich.” in front of the word “vignette.” Critique of the Power of Judgment, 194. A more common translation of “sinnreich,” however, is “meaningful,” “witty,” “clever” or, as in Pluhar’s translation, “ingenious.”
- 4.
For further reading see Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: an essay on the history of the idea of nature.
- 5.
The instrument consists of a wooden or metal frame fitted with loose disks of metal that jingle when shaken. It was used in religious ceremonies and is still used in Coptic services today.
- 6.
The print is signed as “Heuman[n] fecit Göttingae.” Heuman[n] is most likely to be the engraver and illustrator Georg Daniel Heumann who lived from 1691 to 1759.
- 7.
The passages referring to Isis’s self-description and the injunction on graven images are the only passages where Kant uses a superlative expression – “most sublime,” and “nothing more sublime than”– in conjunction with the sublime. On this topic see James Rasmussen, “Language and the Most Sublime in Kant’s Third Critique.” The Journal of Aesthettics and Art Criticism 68.2 (2010), 155.
- 8.
- 9.
Kant rejects the “newly arisen superior tone” of the Sturm und Drang movement in philosophy. For a discussion of Kant’s and Hegel’s uses of the Isis figure see Jacques Derrida’s essay in P. Fenves, Raising the Tone of Philosophy, 117–171.
- 10.
In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant writes about the transcendental ideas as follows: “Pure reason thus furnishes the idea for a transcendental doctrine of the soul (psychologia rationalis), for a transcendental science of the world (cosmologia rationalis), and, finally, for a transcendental knowledge of God (theologia transcendentalis). The understanding is not in a position to yield even the mere project of any of these sciences, not even though it be supported by the highest logical employment of reason.” 323.
- 11.
For an essay on the role of feeling in Kant see Calvin Seerveld, “Early Kant & Rococo Spirit: Setting for the Critique of Judgment,” in Philosophia Reformata. 43 (3,4), 145–167
- 12.
An earlier, arguably less threatening, version of genius can be found in the “blind” function of the productive imagination (Einbildungskraft) in the Critique of Pure Reason: “Synthesis in general ... is the mere result of the power of imagination, a blind, though indispensable function of the soul, without which we would have no knowledge at all, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious.” (B103; italics mine). The Einbildungskraft is responsible for synthesising the forms and categories of the mind with the chaotic manifold of the world of sense impressions. The reason that, although blind and mediating between the “extremes” of sensibility and understanding, the productive imagination is not as dangerous as genius is that it is ultimately a faculty of the a-priori, transcendental functioning mind and thus on the side of the “active” understanding rather than the “passive” body (A124). It is a “productive” rather than merely “re-productive” imagination (A 123).
- 13.
Kant mentions volcanoes and raging storms as examples of phenomena which can create an experience of the sublime. Yet, as Calvin Seerveld observes, after the fatal Lisbon earthquake and subsequent tsunami over Europe’s west coast in 1755 Kant felt compelled to explain the natural causes and effects of earthquakes in the newspapers so as to challenge the prevailing views that natural disasters were judgments of God. Kant wanted to encourage people to study nature and “prescribe laws for the course of natural things” rather than accepting catastrophes like these fatalistically. Calvin Seerveld, “Early Kant & Rococo Spirit: Setting for the Critique of Judgment,” in Philosophia Reformata, 148.
- 14.
In Art, Origins and Otherness Desmond observes a similar tension and comments: “I do not think the dilemma is a historical curiosity, for we still live between Enlightenment and Romanticism. The first is taken up by scientific and technological development. The second takes the form of cultivation of the expressive self – all pervasive in aesthetic modernity – in richer and more vulgar forms. ... The tension emergent in Kant’s time is still with us, though since him we have seen a variety of possible relations between the two.” 66.
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Dengerink Chaplin, A. (2018). Unveiling the Aesthetic in Nature: A Response to Gordon Graham’s Aesthetic Argument for the Existence of God in “Nature, Kant, and God”. In: Buijs, G., Mosher, A. (eds) The Future of Creation Order. New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion , vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92147-1_6
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