SPINOZISM AND KANTS TRANSCENDENTAL IDEAL

Christopher Ward

Abstract: Kants Transcendental Ideal (TI) is presented in a notoriously obscure section of the Critique of Pure Reason. Many readers know that Kants principal purpose in the TI is to show how reason fallaciously derives its concept of God from its idea of the world. But this argument is clothed in a language that is unfamiliar even to skilled commentators on Kants work. In this essay, I present the historical context of the proof, conduct a detailed exegesis of the proof, and argue that Kant formulated the Transcendental Ideal in such a way as to avoid Spinozisma point Kant later seems to have doubted could be avoided. I develop my case in light of some comments made in a lesser-known essay that Kant wrote for the 1795 contest of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin.

In the Ideal of Pure Reason of Book 2 of the Transcendental Dialectic Kant develops an account of how reason comes to its idea of God. This is the first time Kant shows his own fully developed critical method brought to bear upon the problem of the existence of God. The Transcendental Ideal (TI) presents a host of interpretive difficulties since Kant is not explicit about his purpose in the TI, nor is it clear what kind of reason is deployed in the account. With respect to the question of purpose, I think that Kants aim is to describe the fundamental error of reasons transition from a concept of the sum-total of reality to the idea of an independently existing God. This serves the general purpose of the Critique, which is to chasten reasons speculative flights of fancy. Indeed, Kants critique of the speculative proofs of the existence of God which follow the TI are specific reinforcements of this lesson.1 With respect to the question of what (or whose) reason Kant is describing here, most commentators suggest that it is a syncretistic blend of his own early Dilucidatio and Beweisgrund reasoning derived from his own Wolffian and Leibnizian training. While it is generally recognized that within the TI Kants model of predicative determination owes much to his Leibnizian-Wolffian schooling, it is not so clear in what relation the TI stands to the Spinozism that Kant elsewhere and always eschewed. A fresh reading of the Transcendental Ideal is in order which develops that relation and it is precisely this reading that I explore in the following Spinozist interpretation of the Transcendental Ideal.

2002. Idealistic Studies, Volume 32, Issue 3. ISSN 0046-8541.

pp. 221236

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One of the chief goals of interpretation is to make the best possible sense of the text along the lines of what the author had intended through his written words. In the case of the TI, the intention is precisely what is at issue. Throughout Kants writings, his view of the transcendental ideal evolved, such that any interpretation of the TI section in the Critique not only needs to pay attention to Kants preceding views from which he now prescinds, but also needs to take into account Kants later views about the transcendental ideal as well. In light of some comments Kant makes about the ens realissimum in a later essay I would like to develop the case for why a new interpretation for the TI with reference to Spinozas concept of substance and modification is warranted. Prior to that, however, some of the background of the TI and Kants use of that concept needs to be given. One of the chief sources of the TI comes from Kants earlier work.2 From his earliest formulation of the ens realissimum in the Nova Dilucidatio (1755) and Beweisgrund (1763), Kant is already articulating the explanation of how reason comes to its idea of God by means of the requirements of any predicative determination at all. There, Kant is optimistic that he has found the necessary ground for the most real beinga determining ground which must obtain if there is to be any determination whatsoever.3 This reasoning is deployed yet again in the first Critique in the section concerning the TI, but Kants view of the epistemological status of his argument has changed in accordance with the views of the grounds of knowledge as outlined in the Transcendental Analytic. Kant has become skeptical of the possibility of having determinate knowledge of the most real being and argues instead that such a transcendental ideal can be at most a regulative idea for reasonan idea which is not entirely without warrant given the natural patterns of our human reasoning. From the first Critique to the Opus Postumum, Kant continually develops the implications for this critically chastened concept of the transcendental ideal. In the Critique of Practical Reason, for example, the regulative function of the transcendental ideal becomes, in the context of practical reasoning, a moral postulate which grounds the supreme principle of morality. Likewise, in the Critique of Judgment, the transcendental ideal has a regulative function in serving reasons interests to ground the purposive unity of nature. Kants concept of the transcendental ideal is, in each case, legitimate as a regulative ideal for reason, but it is illegitimately conceived when reason uses it transcendentlythat is, when reason fancies itself to have a determinate knowledge of its concept of God from concepts alone. It is important to note the differences between the concept of a transcendent and a transcendental theology, if we are to understand why Kant thinks the former illegitimate while the latter legitimate (within certain bounds) in the new critical philosophy. What makes the transcendental ideal transcendental and not transcendent in the TI is the epistemic distinction between viewing the concept of God as a regulative ideal (a legitimate transcendental application) and viewing the concept of God as a reality of which human reason can possess determinate knowledge (an illegitimate transcendent application). 4 Along with other forms of dogmatism, Spinozism can be identified as transcendent because of its claims to determinate

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knowledge of what is supersensible such as when it claims that we may have knowledge (achieved via the geometric method) that all beings are but modes of the one true substance, God. Kants criticism of Spinoza owes much of its force to his general critique of all forms of dogmatism. That criticism asserts that reason is always in error when it exceeds the bounds of sense. The concept of the ens realissimum is thus no more certain, from a speculative standpoint, than Spinozas atheistic God. It may be the case that Kant came to think (as many of his contemporaries did) that transcendent theology is ultimately reducible to a kind of Spinozism. The identification of rational theology with Spinozism was common in German philosophical circles in the later eighteenth century.5 Kants own writing shows a growing interest in refuting Spinozism which is, very likely, driven by a need to distinguish his own critical philosophy from any association with Spinozism.6 In fact, I will show that the very reasoning which Kant had outlined in the Transcendental Ideal is later identified by him with a Spinozistic conception of God. The greatest problem that faces an identification of the two concepts is the preponderance of Kants statements which distinguish the realissimum from Spinozism. Most striking are Kants comments in the Lectures on Philosophical Theology in which he carefully distinguishes between a realissimum that is ens a mundo diversum and Spinozas identification of God and the world, where God and the world are one. 7 But these remarks are from lectures given in 1784 and it is important to remember that these are lectures on the set text of Baumgartens Metaphysica . Kant is not entirely free from that text, as he is in the later prize essay. Kant suggests that the realissimum is a lot like Spinozism in his unpublished prize essay for the 1795 contest of Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin, What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made In Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff? 8 In a section of the prize essay entitled What Progress Can Metaphysics Make in Regard to the Supersensible, Kant addresses the issue of Transcendent Theology.9 That section may be read as a palimpsest over the Transcendental Ideal since it offers an almost identical, albeit more compressed, account. Kants purpose there is to argue that his own critical philosophy is the progress made since the time of Leibniz and Wolff with respect to the problem of God. Kants account offers confirmation that the reason of the TI owes a clear debt to the Leibnizian-Wolffian theory of predication and, surprisingly, the ens realissimum is, in fact, declared by Kant to look a lot like the totality of beings in the world (Spinozism). In the prize essay Kant describes how, in the context of metaphysics, reason attempts to derive the concept of the primordial being from the concept of thinghood in general. In following this procedure (viz., the model of predicative determination in the TI section of the first Critique and in the earlier Beweisgrund essay), reason derives a concept of the most real being as the determining ground of thinghood in general. To explain affirmative reality, reason needs to posit a supreme being containing the totality (omnitudo) of reality (ens realissimum).10 But Kant is keen to point out that our determinate knowledge of this realissimum describes rather our own conceptual needs and not the order of objective reality: metaphysics would do

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better if only it would not take concepts for things and things, or rather their names, for concepts and so argue sophistically and totally in the dark. 11 What Kant means is that although we determine things to be realities by means of a conceptual procedure of predication whereby we affirm certain predicates and deny certain predicates and so rely on a concept of the sum-total of all reality, it is nevertheless an error to assume that our concept of the sum-total of reality is the same as the sum-total of reality. This argument and critical judgment corresponds almost exactly to the arguments in the TI. After having derived the concept of God (in the manner of the TI), Kant writes something very unusual: This One, which metaphysics now improvises, though it may be wondered how, is the supreme metaphysical good. It contains the material for production of all other possible things, as the supply of marble does for an infinite multitude of statues, which are altogether possible only through limitation (separation of the remainder from a certain part of the whole, thus only through negation). Thus, evil, merely as a formal property of things, is distinguished from the good in the world, like shadows in the sunlight streaming through all the space of the universe, and created things are evil only because they constitute parts and not the whole, and thus are partially real and partially negative. In a world fashioned this way one comes strongly to suspect that this metaphysical God (the realissimum ) is one with the world (despite all protestations against Spinozism), as the totality of all existing things (emphasis mine).12 In the TI, Kant never explicitly identifies the realissimum with Spinozism, and the equation of the two in this context poses a serious interpretive challenge. Does Kant now imply that his account of the transcendental ideal given in the first Critique is Spinozistic as well or, on the other hand, is the present account an aberration to be dismissed? What sense can be made of the TI in light of this? These interpretive questions show up as meaningful against a background of commentators who have largely ignored the possibility of the TI referring to a Spinozist conception of God. Norman Kemp Smiths commentary does not mention Spinoza in connection with the TI in any way, although he does make a convincing case that the inner logic of the TI owes much to the Leibnizian-WolffianBaumgartenian context.13 Strawsons comments focus on the far from compelling reasoning of the TI, but he does not attempt to understand the historical antecedents of the TI whatsoever.14 Walsh demonstrates convincingly that Kants story of reason is again the logic of his own Beweisgrund essay, but he too neglects any association of the TI with Spinoza.15 Allan Wood has fully analyzed the Leibnizian logic of the TIs reasoning and he makes only one slight passing comment that the logic of the TI can be found in Descartes, Leibniz, and Wolff, and it could equally have been found in Spinoza and Malebranche. 16 Michelle Grier makes an interesting (though passing) comment in a footnote to the effect that in Spinoza we have an example of how there can be a real distinction between dependent being and the fundamental ground of dependent being in the same way that Kant distinguishes between the omnitudo realitatis and the ens realissimum . 17 Now, the lacuna of a

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well worked out account of the TI in terms of Spinozist concept of God in the literature is noteworthy, but the need for such a study is apparent in the light of what Kant says in the prize essay. In what follows, I examine the argument of the first two sections of the Ideal of Pure Reason. My goal is to demonstrate that it is possible to interpret the predicative model of the omnitudo realitatis along the lines of a Spinozist conception of substance and modesan interpretation of which Kant appears to be aware, given some conditions which he himself imposes upon the transition from an omnitudo realitatis to an ens realissimum in the TI. I shall limit my formulations of the doctrine of Spinoza to the sources that Kant himself would have had access to: Pierre Bayles Dictionary and Jacobis Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza.18

Section I: The Ideal In General

It is important to understand the first section, for it establishes the conceptual groundwork for the TI. In this first section of chapter 3, Kant reiterates his commitment to the unity of the intuitions of sensibility and the concepts of the understanding as the basis of any positive knowledge as well as introducing some new concepts and their definitions which will figure as essential components in his explanation of how reason gets the idea of God. These concepts include idea , ideal , archetype, in concreto, in individuo. I shall explain both this principle of unity and each of the new concepts in order to understand in what way the transcendental ideal is and is not acceptable epistemically. The principle announced in the first line of section 1 is the epistemic principle upon which the entirety of Kants critique of the dialectical illusions of the transcendental ideas is based. It happens also to be a very good one-line distillation of the Transcendental Analytic itself. Kant writes, We have seen above that no objects can be represented through pure concepts of understanding, apart from the conditions of sensibility.19 There can be no objective reality to concepts that are not subject to the conditions of sensibility, for the conditions of the objective reality of the concepts are then absent, and nothing is to be found in them save the mere form of thought.20 On the basis of this alone, a perceptive reader might well anticipate the negative outcome of chapter 3 with respect to reasons ability to determine affirmatively the question of the existence of God. While Kant mentions this principle only briefly at the outset, this principlea mainstay of his Copernican Revolution lies silently lurking until pressed to service late in sections 2 and 3, at which point the exuberance of reasons supposition of a transcendent God is, by the test of this principle, chastened and reduced to an empty formalism, clinching the case for the supremacy of critical philosophy over the Leibnizian-Wolffian, even Spinozistic metaphysical paradigm. Kant introduces us in this first section to the distinction between an idea and an ideal. We know from book 1 of the Transcendental Dialectic that an idea is a species of representation (with consciousness) which, belonging to knowledge, is a concept derived from notions and which transcends the possibility of experience. As such, ideas are abstractions for which no appearance can be found in which they can be

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represented in concreto.21 There is in them a completeness for which no determinate empirical experience is indicated that is to say, there is no single thing which, being referred to by them, can be pointed to by us in our experience in concreto. Ideas serve merely as regulative principles by means of which reason aims only at a systematic unity,22 but is never able to accomplish fully the task. An ideal , on the other hand, is even further removed from objective reality. Kant likens the ideal to what Plato referred to as ideas. These are archetypes which not only contain all that is in the idea, but contain them as particular individuals in individuo which exist absolutely and as the supreme individual exemplars of what is contained in the idea in concreto. Kant writes, [a]s the idea gives the rule, so the ideal in such a case serves as the archetype for the complete determination of the copy.23 Such ideals provide the regulative use of reason with grounds for an ever greater schematic unity of knowledge, as well as for the promulgation of moral action when they are taken as postulates of practical reason. It is important to recognize, however, that both ideas and ideals cannot in principle be an object of any particular experience and correspondingly suffer from an incompleteness of determination which makes them, in principle, ungrounded ideas. We shall see how these concepts are relevant in section II.

Section II: The Transcendental Ideal (Prototypon Transcendentale)

First Step: From the Principle of Determinability to the Principle of Complete Determination Kant begins his explanation with a relatively simple principle, the principle of determinability. This states that of every two contradictorily opposed predicates only one can belong to a concept. 24 This principle is supported by the principle of noncontradiction and is accepted by most every philosopherLeibniz and Spinoza alike. Now, Kant expands this principle, transforming it into the principle of complete determination according to which if all the possible predicates of things be taken together with their contradictory opposite, then one of each pair of contradictory opposites must belong to it (every thing considered in respect of its possibility).25 This principle goes beyond the mere logical form of predication as described by the principle of determinability because it suggests that for each thing there must be more than a mere absence of contradiction within the thing itself, there must be a determination of the thing with respect to the sum-total of all possibilities (predicates). 26 Kant tells us that this concerns the content and not the form, and this means that with respect to the possible content of predicates present in a thing, one of every pair of possible predicates must always belong to it.27 The opacity of Kants text at A573 supra is clarified when he states that possible predicates may be either logically negated or transcendentally negated. A logical negation signifies the opposite predicate of a certain opposed set where the opposite may be a positive predicate as well: e.g., non- mortal is the logical negation of mortal since it expresses the possibility of something which is not mortala being that is a something and not a mere nothing, such as an angel. Transcendental negation,

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on the other hand, signifies not-being in itself such that negation here does not express merely the opposite of a certain property, but its absence. On the other side, transcendental affirmation posits the existence of a certain entity and is entitled reality, because through it alone, and so far only as it reaches, are objects something (things).28 The determination of a thing by means of the principle of complete determination stipulates that a thing is determined to possess a predicate or it does not, not that it must possess either one of two opposed predicates such as light or dark, heavy or light, small or large. Wood has argued that this principle of complete determination comes to Kant directly from Wolff and Baumgarten. According to Baumgarten, the complex of all determinations compossible in a being is its THOROUGH DETERMINATION. Hence a being is either determined thoroughly, or determined less than this. The former is a particular, the latter a universal.29 This means no more than that an individual being is determined precisely because all of the predicates which constitute its individuality are affirmed in that entity (and their opposites negated), whereas a universal concept remains indeterminate precisely because it admits of many possible contradictory affirmative and negative predicates. This concept of individuation has deeper roots than Baumgarten, and can be traced to Leibnizs theory of complete individuation.30 Leibniz argues that in the perfect notion of an individual thing there are contained all its predicates, both necessary and contingent, past, present, and future.31 We shall see that the concept of individuation can easily be seen in Spinozas determination of the modes of substance as well. Wood and Grier both point out that Kant came to disagree (as early as the Dilucidatio) with the Leibnizians and Wolffians on the precise manner in which the principle of individuation works. The principle of complete determination, thinks Kant, is not sufficient to determine completely an individual with respect to its predicates if that principle relies on nothing other than the principle of non-contradiction.32 In order for there to be a complete determination of an individual there is the need of a sum-total of all possibility which exists prior to the determinatio itself. Second Step: Transition From a Sum-Total of All Possibility to an Omnitudo Realitatis For Kant, the concept of the sum-total of all possibility is the condition of the complete determination of each and every thing where such determination is not mere logical determination but complete determination. Negative determination cannot be thought completely, since it is parasitic upon transcendental affirmation, viz. reality. The sum-total of all possibility thus presents the possibility for the affirmative complete determination of all that exists because we recognize that a thing may only be what it is because it does not contradict all other possible predicates considered as broadly as possible. But this complete determination can never be exhibited in concreto ,33 since it is a concept which is based solely on the faculty of reason and does not have, in principle, an empirical content. The concept of this sum-total is itself completely determined a priori because, although we do not know every predicate that is

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contained in the sum-total, we nevertheless know what is excluded from this sumtotal by means of the law of excluded middle and the principle of non-contradiction. But this sum-total is more than mere logical possibility, since the principle of complete determination is the principle whereby transcendental affirmations are rendered possible. Transcendental affirmations are reality and any negation is parasitic upon the sum-total of all reality to which Kant gives the name of the omnitudo realitatis. Third Step: Transition From an Omnitudo Realitatis to an Ens Realissimum Kant refers to the sum-total of all reality as a transcendental substrate. It is the repository of the material of all the possible predicates which Kant, in turn, calls the omnitudo realitatis.34 The important point here is that this All is used by reason as an explanatory device (a transcendental ideal) for the determination of predicates which may be applied to things. It is meant to describe the real ground for the complete determination of things. It also happens to bear a striking prima facie resemblance to Spinozas Godthe hen kai pan mentioned by Jacobi. In order to see this, it is necessary to understand precisely what Kant means by this omnitudo realitatis. Kant tells us that what thus possesses all reality is just the concept of a thing in itself as completely determined.35 But the complete determination of things in themselves runs contrary to the Transcendental Analytics conclusion that concepts must be schematized if they are to represent determinate realities. This forces Kant to make a special plea for the omnitudo realitatis as the unique exception. This sumtotal is the supreme and complete material condition of the possibility of all that exists,36 and must be viewed as an individual, the ens realissimum, which is translated literally as the most real being. In doing this, reason is developing only a transcendental ideal.37 As such, reason does not presuppose the existence of such a being that corresponds to this ideal, but only the idea of such a being, and this only for the purpose of deriving from an unconditioned totality of complete determination the totality of the limited.38 This ideal is the archetype (prototypon) of all things, for it is the basis for their possibility to be rendered determinate as beings, for determinate things are merely limitations of a greater and ultimately, of the highest reality.39 It is clear that this model of predication has deeper roots than Wolff, going back to Plato and furnishing a substantial body of philosophical and theological speculation with its participation metaphor and emanation scheme. In the prize essay Kant had suggested that we view this One under a powerful metaphor which give us an image through which to consider how the omnitudo realitatis and the principle of complete determination shape reality. In what may be called the Marble-Quarry Metaphor, Kant writes it (the Onethe All) contains the material for production of all other possible things, as the supply of marble does for an infinite multitude of statues, which are altogether possible only through limitation (separation of the remainder from a certain part of the whole, thus only through negation).40 In this case, individual entities are, like the statues of Michelangelo, produced through the removal (i.e. negation) of material (possible predicates) which conflict with the affirmative determinations of an individual. In the first Critique , Kant writes that the omnitudo realitatis is the whole store of material from

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which all possible predicates of things must be taken . . . all true negations are nothing but limitations . . . upon the All. 41 In both cases, the One and All (hen kai pan?) is conceived as the supreme material condition for the possibility of things in general. This concept of an underlying transcendental material substrate and its limitation through determination (negation) bears a striking resemblance to the metaphysical doctrine of Spinoza. In the entry on Spinoza in his Dictionary , Bayle describes the many ways in which something (a modification) can be said to be in God. For Spinoza, however, God is not merely an efficient and transitive cause but the material cause in which its modifications inhere as accidents in a substance: According to Spinoza, the creatures are in God, either as an effect in its material cause, or as an accident in its subject of inhesion, or as the form of a candlestick in the pewter it is made of.42 The individual entities are, according to Spinoza, modifications of the one true substance, and Bayle recognized that for Spinoza each modification is subject to the principle of non-contradiction and cannot exhibit within itself what is self-contradictory. The order of dependent beings (natura naturata) is therefore a specific limitation by negation of the sum-total of all reality, that is, God (natura naturans).43 Kants model of predicative determination in the CPR, however, is based upon a disjunctive syllogism which is the formal logical counterpart of the marble quarry metaphor. The determination of an individual entity can be represented in the form of a disjunctive syllogism in which the major premise represents the sum-total of all reality and the minor premise represents the negation (limitation, division) of that sum-total, the conclusion represents the affirmative realities that constitute an individuated entity.44 Kant argues that in order for there to be any complete determination, i.e. individuation, there is the need of the complete determination of a concept of the sum-total of reality which is not merely a concept which, as regards its transcendental content, comprehends all predicates under itself; it also contains them within itself; and the complete determination of any and every thing rests on the limitation of this total reality.45 What kind of containment does Kant have in mind when he claims that within the sum-total of reality all predicates are comprehended? Kant must have known that the realissimum defined in this way looks a lot like Spinozism. I believe that it is for that reason that Kant distinguishes the sum-total of all reality as a container in the sense of a ground rather than as an aggregate. Henry Allison remarks that one of Kants most frequently expressed objections to this conception (the Spinozistic model of God as the world and its beings as modifications of that substance) . . . is that it involves the conflation of the relation of dependence, which holds between its ground or cause, with that of inherence, which holds between substance and accident. The pitfalls of Spinozism, according to Kant, can be avoided simply by keeping these two relations distinct.46 Kant may be making this distinction when he argues that the derivation of all possibility from this primordial being cannot, strictly speaking, be regarded as a limitation of its supreme reality, and, as it were a division of it. 47 If we mistake the method by means of which our reason merely represents the concept of the sum-total of all reality with the actual ens realissimum, then the primordial being would be treated as a

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mere aggregate of derivative beings.48 But the concept of limitation by negation is merely a way to represent transcendental affirmation with respect to the sum-total of all reality (which is nothing other than a transcendental ideal ), and so it does not describe the order of reality so much as a relation of ideas to concepts.49 Now, Kant claims that with respect to the actual relation (strictly speaking) between the primordial being and derivative beings it must condition the possibility of all things as their ground, not as their sum. 50 Kant has, with this distinction, closed the door on the possibility of a Spinozist interpretation of the realissimum . God is not a substance consisting of the sum-total of reality in this world but is rather the ground of the reality of this world.51 It is important to note that Kant is very careful not to claim that we have determinate knowledge of the existence of such a sum-total of all reality, but merely a determinate concept of its ideahence the ideal of the ens realissimum. There is good reason to identify the procedure for deriving the concept of the ens realissimum (i.e. the procedure of the complete determination of thinghood in general) with the procedure used by both Leibniz and Spinoza. Kant seems to be aware, however, that in moving from the concept of an omnitudo realitatis to an ens realissimum there may be an opening to Spinozism, but also realized that this must be closed off if we are to move from the ens realissimum to a concept of God. Fourth Step: From an Ens Realissimum to the Concept of God The concept of this ens realissimum is easily thought of as the primordial being (ens originarium), the highest being (ens summum), and as the being of all beings (ens entium ). And this being is easily conceived under the concept of God . The explanation of how we get to the idea of God is nearly complete. The final move in reasons assent to the idea is to go beyond the mere idea of such an entity by affirming the existence of such an idea as a real being. Reason hypostatizes the idea of God which is given to it in the concept of the ens realissimum which is, in turn, the given to it through the concept of the omnitudo realitatis. Reason hypostatizes the idea of God in the following way: first, the objects of the senses can be completely determined only when their predicates are ascribed to them affirmatively or negatively through a comparison with all the predicates possible in the field of appearance (no contradiction is asserted); second, the material for the possibility of such determination must be presupposed as given in a sumtotal of all reality omnitudo realitatis ; third, the sum-total of all reality is conceived under an ideal, the ens realissimum ; fourth, through a natural illusion reason regards this ideal of the ens realissimum as an ens originarium an ens summum and an ens entium from which we derive our concept of God. Kant warns us, however, that this last step is an illegitimate move on the part of reason, even though it has a strong natural tendency in this direction. Reason has erred because it substitute(s) dialectically for the distributive unity of the empirical employment of the understanding, the collective unity of experience as a whole . . . and then think(s) this whole [realm] of appearance as one single thing that contains all empirical reality itself.52 But since this ideal cannot, in principle, be an object of

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experience because its concept has no conditions of sensibility under which it may be represented, it is but an empty form of thought. It is what Kant later refers to as a mere regulative idea.

Concluding Remark
Can Kants statements about the Spinozistic character of a realissimum derived from a principle of complete determination in the prize essay be squared with the view of the ens realissimum of the TI? I have argued that they can be. It may be inferred on the basis of the distinctions made in the third step of the preceding exegesis of the TI that Kant did not want to identify the ens realissimum with a Spinozistic conception of God at the time that he wrote the TI section in the first Critique. Kant avoids conflating the TI with Spinozism by trading off the concept of an omnitudo realitatis as a sum of all reality for a concept of an ens realissimum as a ground of all reality. Such a deduction may have struck him later as no more epistemically tenable than the Spinozism from which he had sought to extricate the ens realissimum in the TI. Indeed, after the first Critique Kant never attempts deriving a concept of God from the predicative model of determination as he had in the Beweisgrund essay. The status of the prize essay in the development of Kants thought should be seen as a moment of critical reflection in which Kant is yet again reassessing the rational grounds for an ens realissimum . Additional work in this vein may wish to situate the prize essay between the concept of God in the TI and the struggle against Spinoza in the later parts of the Opus Postumum. Marquette University

Notes
1. To be sure, Kants overall interest is twofold: 1) to demonstrate the inability of speculative reason to obtain determinate knowledge of Gods existence, and 2) to demonstrate the inevitability and utility of the idea of God as a regulative idea of reason. 2. On this point see W. H. Walsh, Kants Criticism of Metaphysics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975), pp. 214219. 3. Immanuel Kant, A New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition (1755) and The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763), both found in Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 17551770 , translated and edited by David Walford and Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 4. Transcendent and transcendental are related to cognition, but pick out different features of that cognition. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes, transcendental and transcendent are not interchangeable terms. The principles of pure understanding . . . allow only of empirical and not transcendental employment, that is, employment extending beyond the limits of experience. A principle, on the other hand, which takes away these limits, or even commands us actually to transgress them, is called transcendent (A296/B293). Spinozas dictum that God can be thought equally under the two modes of thought and extension as well

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as Leibnizs view that contingent truths are but confused modes of necessary truths are examples of transcendent reason. I think Kant accepts the possibility of a transcendental idealwith the caveat that it be understood as a regulative idea only, and that we claim for that regulative idea only that it be subjectively necessary and not objectively necessary. 5. The Jacobi-Mendelssohn controversy culminating in Kants writing of What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? is usually seen as the origin of the Kant-Jacobi controversy. See translators introduction to What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? in Religion and Rational Theology, edited and translated by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). The earliest identification of the philosophy of Leibniz with the pantheism of Spinoza may go back to pietist objections against the Leibnizian-Wolffian school. Bieser writes, Some of the disciples of Thomasius, notably Joachim Lange and Johann Franz Budde, argued that Wolffs rationalism, if consistent, led straight to the atheism and fatalism of Spinoza. See Fred Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). The connection was developed in Mendelssohns Dialogues where the character Neophil makes the argument that Leibnizs system of a pre-established harmony is compatible with Spinozas claim that the order and connection of concepts is one and the same with the order and connection of things. See Moses Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, translated and edited by Daniel O. Dahlstrohm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 96111. Jacobis reading of Kants Beweisgrund proof draws the further connection that Kants reasoning (clearly derived from the Leibnizian-Wolffian model of complete determination) leads to Spinozism. Beiser writes, To Jacobi, Kants proof was tantamount to a demonstration of the existence of Spinozas God. For what is Spinozas God, Jacobi asks, other than the concept of existence itself, that being of which everything else is only a limitation? Beiser, op. cit., p. 55. 6. See, for example, the later parts of the Opus Postumum where Kant distinguishes his own fundamental ontology of a universum consisting of God and the World (as distinct entities) from a Spinozistic universe in which the world inheres in the mind of God. 7. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion, in Religion and Rational Theology , edited and translated by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 381. 8. Immanuel Kant What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany Since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff? Translation and introduction by Ted Humphrey ( New York: Abaris Books, 1983) (hereafter referred to as Prize Essay ). This essay was never submitted to the contest by Kant, but was given to his friend Rink in 1802 or 1803, who published it after Kants death in 1804. 9. Prize Essay, pp. 137143. 10. Prize Essay, p. 137. 11. Prize Essay, p. 139. 12. Prize Essay, p. 139. The talk of evil as a privation does not figure in the discussion of the TI in the first Critique, to be sure, and its presence here is merely another way of talking about negation. 13. Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kants Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), pp. 522525.

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14. P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kants Critique of Pure Reason (London: Methuen & Co., 1966), pp. 221223. 15. W. H. Walsh, Kants Criticism of Metaphysics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975), pp. 214219. 16. Allen Wood, Kants Rational Theology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 2863. Woods commentary on the TI is monumental in that it offers an unparalleled depth of exegesis of the logic of the TI in terms of the especially Leibnizian background, but also in that it offers a positive assessment of the TI which differs from Kemp Smiths traditional view. Wood writes, (the TI) is an attempt to show how the concept of a supremely real being arises naturally and even inevitably in the course of working out the implications of a set of commonly accepted metaphysical presuppositions. We could say that the project is not one of describing how people in fact come to have a concept of God, but rather of showing why anyone who thinks philosophically had better have it (p. 62). 17. Michelle Grier, Kants Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), note 28, p. 243. This is a brilliant point and one which may explain Kants remark about Spinozism in the Prize Essay. Perhaps Kant himself came to appreciate this feature of Spinozas doctrine through an increased understanding of Spinoza through Jacobis published works in the mid to late 1780s. 18. According to Lee Rice, Kant (like many of his contemporaries) did not read the actual text of Spinozas Ethics. The primary source for Spinoza came through Pierre Bayles Dictionary Historical and Critical. With the publication of the Jacobi-Mendelssohn letters in Jacobis Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn in 1785, Kant would have had access to a more accurate exegesis of the Ethics. 19. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), translated by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martins Press, 1965), A568/B596. 20. CPR A568/B596. 21. CPR A568/B596. 22. CPR A568/B596. 23. CPR A569/B597. 24. CPR A572/B600. 25. CPR A572/B600. 26. CPR A572/B600. 27. CPR A573/B603. 28. CPR A575/B603. 29. Baumgarten, Metaphysica (Halle, 1963), ss. 148 in Allen Wood, Kants Rational Theology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 38. 30. Wood cites Leibniz, Philosophische Schriften, ed. C. J. Gerhardt (Berlin, 1890), 7:311. A good treatment of the issue may be found in Lee Rice, Individuation in Leibniz and Spinoza, NASS Monograph #8 (1999), pp. 1940. 31. Wood, Kants Rational Theology, p. 39. 32. See Wood, Kants Rational Theology, p. 3940 and Grier, p. 235. Kant writes, This principle does not rest merely on the law of contradiction.; for besides considering each thing

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in its relation to the two contradictory predicates, it also considers it in relation to the sumtotal of all possibilities ( CPR A572/B600). 33. CPR A573/B601. 34. CPR A576/B604. 35. CPR A576/B604. 36. CPR A576/B604. 37. Smith and England have questioned the legitimacy of the transition from a sum of all reality to an ens realissimum on the grounds that such a transition is deeply inconsistent with the Amphiboly, where Kant says that there might be a Realrepugnanz between realitiesthat they might cancel each other out. Wood argues otherwise. See Wood, Kants Rational Theology, p. 57. 38. CPR A578/B606. 39. CPR A578/B606. 40. Immanuel Kant, What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff? Translation and introduction by Ted Humphrey ( New York: Abaris Books, 1983), p. 139. 41. CPR A576/B604. 42. Pierre Bayle, The Dictionary Historical and Critical, vol. 5 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984), p. 222. 43. Bayle, ibid. Those substances are in God, and cannot exist out of him or without him. It is therefore no wonder if Spinoza called them modifications; but on the other hand, he did not deny that there was a real difference between them, and that each of them constituted a particular principle of actions or passions, in such a manner, that one of them does what the other does not; and that when one denies of one of them what is affirmed of the other, it is according to the rules of Logic, and no body can object to Spinoza, that it follows from his principles, that two contradictory propositions are true of one and the same subject at the same time. On a similar note, Jacobi writes a letter to Mendelssohn in 1785 in which he articulates forty-four propositions which are the core of Spinozas doctrine. In his twelfth proposition, Jacobi writes determinatio est negatio, seu determinatio ad rem juxta suum esse non pertinet . Individual things therefore, so far as they only exist in a determinate mode, are non-entia; the indeterminate infinite being is the one single true ens reale, hoc est, est omne esse, & praeter quod nullum datur esse. In Friedrich Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill , translated from the German with an introductory study, notes, and bibliography by George di Giovanni (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1994), pp. 220221. 44. Wood has a lengthy treatment of this procedure. See Wood, Kants Rational Theology, pp. 5055. 45. CPR A577/B605. 46. Henry Allison, Kants Critique of Spinoza, in The Philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, edited by Richard Kennington (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1980), p. 206. 47. CPR A579/B607. 48. CPR A579/B607.

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49. CPR A579/B607. 50. CPR A579/B607.

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51. In the Lectures on Philosophical Theology , Kant makes the point that the ens realissimum is an ens extramundum. See Lectures in Religion and Rational Theology, translated and edited by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 382. 52. CPR A583/B611.

Bibliography
Allison, Henry. Kants Critique of Spinoza, in The Philosophy of Baruch Spinoza edited by Richard Kennington. Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1980. Bayle, Pierre. The Dictionary Historical and Critical, vol. 5. New York: Garland Publishing, 1984. Beiser, Fred. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. Grier, Michelle. Kants Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Jacobi, Friedrich. The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill . Translated from the German with an introductory study, notes, and bibliography by George di Giovanni. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1994. Kant, Immanuel. A New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition (1755), and The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763). Both in Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 17551770. Translated and edited by David Walford and Ralf Meerbote. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. . Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martins Press, 1965. . Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion, in Religion and Rational Theology , edited and translated by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. . Opus Postumum , edited by Eckart Forstner, translated by Eckart Forstner and Michael Rosen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. . What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? In Religion and Rational Theology , edited and translated by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. . What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff? Translation and introduction by Ted Humphrey. New York: Abaris Books, 1983.

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Mendelssohn, Moses. Philosophical Writings. Translated and edited by Daniel O. Dahlstrohm. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Rice, Lee. Individuation in Leibniz and Spinoza, in North American Spinoza Society Monograph #8 (1999), pp. 1940. Smith , Norman Kemp. A Commentary to Kants Critique of Pure Reason. New York: Humanities Press, 1962. Strawson, P. F. The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kants Critique of Pure Reason. London: Methuen & Co., 1966. Walsh, W. H. Kants Criticism of Metaphysics . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975. Wood, Allen. Kants Rational Theology. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978.