Sárospataki Füzetek 15. (2011)

2011 / 4. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Kónya Péter: Szlovák reformátusok a 17-18. században

Kierkegaard - a flag in the winds of change

need ‘practical reason’. For S. Kierkegaard it meant that we need commitment. Kierkegaard could also rejoice that Kant began the ‘Copernican revolution in epistemology’, which says that our knowledge does not come unmediated or unfiltered from the object, but also or perhaps primarily from the subjective mind’s composition of an understanding of what our empirical senses portray to us. But S. Kierkegaard, while accepting this turn toward ‘the subjective’, could not accept Kant’s bifurcation of the phenomenal and the noumenal.

Kant is complex. It helps to define his phrase ‘transcendental unity of apperception’.* For Kant the mind is not a ‘blank tablet’ (Locke). The mind is an active composer of understandings. In other words, the data of empirical experience via our senses (sight, sounds, shapes, colours, time) are organized or integrated by the active mind into unified meanings. This transcendental (wider integration) is by means of the minds apperception, which is an understanding which goes beyond empirical perception. ‘Transcendental’ refers to the minds integration or composition of meaning, which is outside (beyond) empirical experience - but the transcendental insights of the mind are necessary for knowledge. ‘Transcendent’, however, refers to that which is beyond experience and knowledge. Kant said that the commandment against making images of God exactly tells us that we should not be deluded into thinking that we can see beyond the bounds of that which is sensible (empirical).

In short terms we may explain Kant’s phenomenal realm as empirical reality known via our senses. The numenal in Latin (‘numen’) refers to higher power and to divinity, the transcendent (beyond direct experience and not certain to reason due to the antinomies this raises). For Kant the noumenal realm refers to ‘things in themselves’ which we do not directly know, for our knowledge is always filtered via our experiences and our mind. We do not experience things as they ‘are’, but as they appear (phenomena = appearances) to us. The noumenal is also called the transcendental realm, or ideal but unknown ‘essence’ of things. We do not know ‘things in themselves’. Later Rudolph Otto would write about The Idea of the Holy (1917) as the numinous, that is, the intuitive experience of the Divine as the Holy, as Other, Incomprehensible, and Awesome. Heschel would say that our experience of awe at the unfathomable (ungraspable) and ineffable (unspeakable) is based on objective givens which produce the subjective experience. Such themes remain throughout dialectical theology. Kant did not mean that the mind works only subjectively (as in Hume’s scepticism of contact with reality). Rather there is a correspondence between a reality that is graspable by transcendental apperception and the mind’s activity. Kant did not deny the data of religious knowledge and experience, but wants to place the infinite God beyond our finite categories — which became a main pillar of dialectical theology. Kant put God out of reach of ‘reason’, but Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ leads back to God. So does Kant’s awe before the ‘sublime’. By the sublime he means the overwhelming sensation of power and majesty we find in the ocean and sky, thunder and lightning, high waterfalls and gorging streams. We cannot avoid the feeling of amazement, sometimes fear, sometimes a sacred thrill. Nietzsche said that Kant left the cage of immaturity when 8

8 See Oliver A. Johnson, ‘Immanuel Kant’, in Ian P. McGreal, ed., Great Thinkers of the Western World (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 281-285.

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