General remark on teleology

Should the question be raised what rank the moral argument—which proves God's existence merely as a matter of faith for pure practical reason—may claim among the remaining ones within philosophy, then the entire stock of the latter can readily be surveyed, whereupon it emerges that here there is nothing to choose, but rather that philosophy's theoretical faculty must, before an impartial critique, of its own accord relinquish all its claims.

It must, above all, base every holding-true upon a matter of fact, if such holding-true is not to be wholly without ground; and thus the sole difference in proving can lie only in this: whether, upon this fact, one can base a holding-true of the conclusion drawn from it that counts as knowledge within theoretical cognition, or only as faith within practical cognition. All matters of fact belong either to the concept of nature, whose reality is borne out in those objects of sense that are given (or that can be given) prior to all concepts of nature; or to the concept of freedom, whose reality is adequately established by the causality that reason exercises with respect to certain effects it makes possible in the world of sense—effects that it postulates irrefutably in the moral law. The concept of nature (which pertains merely to theoretical cognition) is, then, either metaphysical and wholly a priori; or physical, that is, a posteriori and, of necessity, only thinkable by way of determinate experience. The metaphysical concept of nature (which assumes no determinate experience whatever) is thus an ontological one.

Now the ontological proof of the divine existence, which sets out from an original being's very concept, is either the one that reasons, from ontological predicates—by which alone that being admits of being thought as thoroughgoingly determined—to an absolutely necessary existence, or the one that reasons, from the absolute necessity of the existence of some thing or other, whatever that may be, back to the predicates of the original being: for the concept of an original being requires, if it is not to be derivative, the unconditioned necessity of its existence together with (so that this may be represented) the thoroughgoing determination furnished by the concept of that being. Both requirements were now thought discoverable in the concept attaching to the ontological idea of a most real being of all: and so two metaphysical proofs arose.

The proof that lays a merely metaphysical concept of nature at its foundation (the one strictly termed ontological) reasoned, from the concept of the most real being of all, to its unconditionally necessary existence; for—so the claim goes—were it not to exist, it would be wanting in a reality, namely existence. — The other (also styled the metaphysical-cosmological proof) reasoned, from the necessity that some thing or other exist (which, since an existence is given to me in self-consciousness, must in any case be granted), to the thoroughgoing determination of that same thing as the most real being of all: since everything existent is thoroughgoingly determined, whereas the strictly necessary (that is, what we are to cognize as such, and so a priori) must be thoroughgoingly determined through its concept; a determination, however, that can be encountered only in the concept of a most real thing of all. There is no need here to lay bare the sophistry residing in both inferences, a task already accomplished elsewhere; it suffices to observe that proofs of this kind, however one might sustain them by every sort of dialectical subtlety, could nonetheless never carry beyond the schools into the wider commonwealth, nor exert the least influence upon plain healthy understanding.

The proof that lays at its foundation a concept of nature which can only be empirical, yet which is nevertheless meant to carry beyond nature's limits as the sum of the objects of sense, can be no other than the one derived from the ends of nature: a concept that admits of being given not a priori but only through experience, and yet holds out such a concept of nature's primordial ground as, alone among all we can think, is fitted to the supersensible—namely that of a supreme understanding as the world's cause; which in fact it fully accomplishes according to principles of the reflecting power of judgment, that is, in keeping with how our (human) faculty of cognition is constituted. — But whether, from the very same data, it is able also to supply this concept of a supreme—that is, independent, intelligent—being as that of a God, that is, of the author of a world governed by moral laws, and hence one determined sufficiently for the idea of a final end of the world's existence: that is the question on which everything hinges, whether what we now require is a concept of the original being that is theoretically adequate for the sake of our entire knowledge of nature, or a practical one for religion.

This argument, drawn from physical teleology, is worthy of reverence. It produces the same effect toward conviction on the ordinary understanding as on the most subtle thinker; and a Reimarus, in his still unsurpassed work—wherein he sets out this proof-ground at length, with the thoroughness and clarity that are his own—has thereby won for himself an imperishable merit. — Yet by what means does this proof win so powerful an influence over the mind—especially when it is appraised by cold reason (for the mind's being stirred and uplifted by nature's marvels might be reckoned as mere persuasion)—an influence toward a calm assent that surrenders itself wholly to it? It is not the physical ends—which do, all of them, point toward an unfathomable understanding in the world's cause—that bring this about; for these fall short of it, since they do not satisfy the demand of inquiring reason. For to what purpose (so reason asks) are all those artful natural things; to what purpose the human being himself, with whom, as the last end of nature that we can think, we are obliged to halt; to what purpose does this whole of nature exist, and what is the final end of art so vast and so varied? To be created for enjoyment, or for beholding, contemplating, and admiring (which, if it goes no further, is itself likewise nothing beyond a peculiar sort of enjoyment), as the ultimate final end for whose sake the world and the human being himself exist—with this reason cannot be satisfied: for reason presupposes a personal worth—one the human being alone can confer on himself—as the very condition on which he and his existence can alone be a final end. Lacking this worth (which alone admits of a determinate concept), the ends of nature do not meet his demand, chiefly because they can put into his hands no determinate concept of the supreme being, namely of it as all-sufficient (and precisely thereby unique, properly to be called the highest being), nor of the laws by which its understanding is the world's cause.

That the physical-teleological proof therefore carries conviction, as if it were at once a theological one, does not arise from employing the ideas of nature's ends as just so many empirical proof-grounds for a highest understanding; rather, there insinuates itself unnoticed into the inference that moral proof-ground which resides in every human being and stirs him so inwardly, in virtue of which one also ascribes to the being that manifests itself so inconceivably artfully in the ends of nature a final end, and hence wisdom (though without any entitlement to this from the perception of the former), and so arbitrarily completes that argument in respect of the deficiency still clinging to it. In fact, then, only the moral proof-ground brings about the conviction—and this, too, only in a moral respect, to which everyone feels his assent most inwardly; whereas the physical-teleological one has merely the merit of leading the mind, in its survey of the world, onto the path of ends, and thereby onto an intelligent world-author: whereupon the moral bearing upon ends, and the idea of just such a lawgiver and world-author, taken as a theological concept—though it is a pure addition—nonetheless seems of itself to unfold out of that proof-ground.

On this point one may, in the customary exposition, henceforth also let the matter rest. For it is usually hard for the common and healthy understanding to hold apart as heterogeneous the different principles that it runs together, and from only one of which it actually, and rightly, draws its inference, whenever separating them out calls for much reflection. But the moral proof-ground for God's existence does not, strictly speaking, merely round out the physical-teleological one into a complete proof; it is rather a proof of its own, one that supplies the deficiency in conviction deriving from the latter: since the latter can in truth achieve nothing beyond guiding reason—in its appraisal of nature's ground and of that contingent yet admirable order of nature which we come to know only through experience—toward the causality of a cause that harbors, according to ends, the ground of that order (a cause we are bound, given the constitution of our cognitive faculties, to think as an intelligent one), and beyond making reason attentive to this, and so more receptive to the moral proof. For what that latter concept demands is so essentially different from all that concepts of nature can contain and teach, that a proof-ground and proof of its own, entirely independent of the foregoing, is required in order to state a concept of the original being sufficient for a theology and to conclude to its existence. — The moral proof (which, admittedly, establishes the existence of God only in a practical, yet also indispensable, respect of reason) would accordingly still stand in full force even if we met with no material at all in the world, or only equivocal material, for a physical teleology. It is conceivable that rational beings might find themselves surrounded by a nature of such a sort as displayed no clear trace of organization, but only effects of a bare mechanism of crude matter—on whose account, and given the mutability of certain merely contingently purposive forms and relations, there would appear to be no warrant for concluding to an intelligent author; and where, in that case, there would likewise be no occasion for a physical teleology: and yet reason, receiving here no direction from concepts of nature, would discover, within the concept of freedom and the ethical ideas resting upon it, a practically sufficient ground for postulating the concept of the original being as conformable to this —that is, as a divinity—and for postulating nature (indeed our own existence) as a final end answering to that divinity and its laws, and this precisely with a view to the indispensable command of practical reason. — But that in the actual world there is, for the rational beings within it, ample material for a physical teleology (which would not, strictly, be necessary) affords the moral argument a welcome corroboration, so far as nature is able to exhibit something analogous to the ideas of reason (the moral ones). For the concept of a supreme cause possessed of understanding (which, however, falls far short of sufficing for a theology) thereby gains the reality that suffices for the reflecting power of judgment; yet it is not needed as the basis of the moral proof: nor does the moral proof serve to round out that other one—which, on its own, gives no hint of morality—into one proof by a continued inference under a single principle. Two principles as heterogeneous as nature and freedom can yield but two distinct manners of proof, since the attempt to conduct the latter out of the former proves inadequate for what is to be demonstrated.

Were the physical-teleological proof-ground to suffice for the proof that is sought, this would be highly gratifying to speculative reason; for it would afford hope of producing a theosophy (for that is what one would have to name any theoretical knowledge of the divine nature and of its existence that sufficed both to explain the world's constitution and, at the same time, to determine the moral laws). Similarly, were psychology adequate to attain thereby to a cognition of the soul's immortality, it would render possible a pneumatology equally welcome to speculative reason. Both, however—however gratifying it might be to the presumption of curiosity—fail to fulfill reason's wish with respect to the theory, which would have to rest on knowledge of the nature of things. But whether the former, as theology, and the second, as anthropology—both resting on the ethical, that is, on the principle of freedom, and hence suited to reason's practical use—do not better fulfill their objective final purpose is another question, one we have no need to pursue further here.

The physical-teleological proof-ground, however, does not reach as far as theology, and this for the reason that it neither gives, nor can give, a concept of the original being determinate enough for that purpose; instead one must draw such a concept entirely from elsewhere, or make good its want by way of an arbitrary supplement. From the great purposiveness of natural forms and their interrelations you infer an intelligent world-cause; but of what degree is this understanding? Beyond doubt you cannot presume upon the highest understanding possible; for that would demand your having insight that no understanding greater than the one whose evidences you perceive in the world is so much as thinkable: which would be tantamount to conferring omniscience upon yourselves. In like manner you infer from the world's magnitude a very great power in the author; but you will resign yourselves to acknowledging that this holds significance only comparatively, for your own power of comprehension, and that, since you have no cognition of everything possible that would let you set it beside the world's magnitude so far as you know it, you cannot on so small a scale conclude to any omnipotence of the author, and so on. By this route, then, you arrive at no determinate concept of an original being serviceable for a theology; for such a concept can be met with only in that of the totality of perfections consonant with an understanding, toward which merely empirical data can afford you no help whatever: and lacking such a determinate concept, you cannot conclude to a single intelligent original being either, but can only assume one (to whatever end that may serve). — Now it can, to be sure, be quite readily granted that you (since reason has nothing well-grounded to urge against it) arbitrarily add: where so much perfection is encountered, one may surely assume all perfection to be united in one sole world-cause; because with so determinate a principle reason manages better, in theory as in practice. But you cannot, for all that, tout this concept of the original being as one you have proved, seeing that you have adopted it only for the sake of a better use of reason. All wailing, therefore, or impotent fuming at the supposed sacrilege of doubting the cogency of your chain of inference, is empty bluster, eager to have the doubt one openly declares against your argument taken for a doubting of sacred truth, so that under this cover its own hollowness may be let slip through.

Moral teleology, on the other hand—no less firmly grounded than the physical, and indeed meriting preference precisely because it rests a priori upon principles that cannot be sundered from our reason—conducts us to that which is required for a theology's possibility, namely to a determinate concept of the supreme cause qua world-cause acting by moral laws, and hence of one that satisfies our moral final end: for which nothing less than omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and so on are required as the natural properties belonging thereto, which have to be conceived as conjoined with, and hence adequate to, the moral final end, itself infinite; and it can in this way, quite by itself alone, furnish the concept of a single world-author serviceable for a theology.

In this way a theology leads also, and directly, to religion, that is, to the cognition of our duties as divine commands: because the cognition of our duty, and of the final end that reason therein imposes on us, was what could first bring forth a determinate concept of God—a concept therefore already, in its very origin, inseparable from an obligation toward this being; whereas, could the concept of the original being also be found determinately along the merely theoretical path (namely, as the mere cause of nature), it would afterward still be attended with great difficulty, perhaps even impossibility, to attribute to this being—without arbitrary interpolation, and by thorough proofs—a causality according to moral laws, apart from which, after all, that ostensibly theological concept can furnish no basis for religion whatever. Were a religion in fact to be founded along this theoretical path, it would, as regards the disposition (wherein, after all, its essential character lies), be really distinct from that one in which the concept of God, and the (practical) conviction of his existence, spring from the foundational ideas of morality. For suppose we had to presuppose the omnipotence, omniscience, and so on of a world-author as concepts handed to us from some other quarter, only afterward to bring our concepts of duty to bear upon our relation to him: then these would necessarily carry with them a very strong colouring of constraint and extorted submission; whereas, when the high regard for the moral law sets before us, entirely freely and by the prescript of our own reason, the final end of our vocation, we then take up into our moral prospects—with the truest reverence, wholly distinct from pathological fear —a cause concordant with that end and with its execution, and submit ourselves to it willingly⁴¹.

If one asks why, after all, it should be of any concern to us to have a theology at all, it becomes plainly evident that it is needed not for extending or rectifying our knowledge of nature, nor indeed any theory whatever, but solely for religion—that is, for the practical, and namely the moral, use of reason—and this in a subjective respect. Should it now turn out that the sole argument leading to a determinate concept of theology's object is itself a moral one, then this will not only occasion no surprise, but one will also, as regards the accessibility of holding-true on the strength of this proof-ground, find nothing lacking with respect to its final purpose, once it is admitted that such an argument establishes God's existence as sufficient only for our moral vocation—that is, in a practical respect—and that speculation therein by no means demonstrates its strength, or thereby enlarges the compass of its territory. The surprise, too, or the alleged conflict of a possibility of theology here maintained with what the critique of speculative reason said of the categories—namely, that these can yield cognition only in their application to objects of sense, but in no way when applied to the supersensible—will vanish once one sees them here put to use for a cognition of God, yet not in a theoretical respect (according to what his nature, unsearchable by us, may be in itself), but solely in a practical one. — In order, on this occasion, to make an end of the misconstrual of that most necessary teaching of the critique—a teaching that, to the vexation of the blind dogmatist, refers reason back within its bounds—I here append the following clarification of it.

When I attribute to a body a moving force, and so think it by way of the category of causality, then thereby I cognize it at the same time; that is, I determine the concept of it as an object in general through that which pertains to it, taken as an object of sense in its own right (this being what makes that relation possible). For if the moving force I attribute to it is a repulsive one, then there accrues to it (even before I place beside it another body against which it exerts that force) a location in space, further an extension—that is, space within itself—and moreover the filling of that space by the repulsive forces of its parts, and finally too the law of this filling (namely that, as the body's extension grows and the space it occupies with those same parts by means of this force increases, the basis of the parts' repulsion must diminish in like proportion). — If, on the contrary, I conceive a supersensible being as the first mover, hence by way of the category of causality with respect to that same world-determination (the movement of matter): then I must place it in no location in space whatever, no more count it as extended—indeed, I am not even permitted to conceive it as existing in time, coexisting with other things. Thus I possess no determinations at all that could render intelligible to me how the motion, having this being for its ground, is so much as possible. Consequently, through the predicate of cause (as first mover) I do not, taken by itself, cognize this being in the slightest: rather I possess only the representation of a something that holds the ground of the world's motions; and its relation to those motions, as their cause—since it otherwise hands me nothing belonging to the makeup of the thing that is the cause—leaves my concept of the latter wholly empty. The reason for this is that, with predicates which find their object solely within the sensible world, I am able indeed to advance to the existence of a something that must hold the ground of that world, but never to fixing what its concept as a supersensible being would be—a concept that expels every one of those predicates. So through the category of causality, when I fix it by the notion of a first mover, I gain no cognition whatever of what God is; but perhaps I shall fare better if, taking my cue from the world's order, I undertake not merely to think his causality as that of a supreme understanding, but also to cognize him through this determination of the said concept: since there the burdensome requirement of space and of extension drops away. — To be sure, the great purposiveness present in the world does force us to think for it a supreme cause, and to conceive its causality as exercised through an understanding; yet this in no way entitles us to attribute the same to it (as, for instance, to think God's eternity as existence throughout all time, since otherwise we can frame no concept whatever of mere existence as a magnitude, that is, as duration; or to think the divine omnipresence as existence in every place, so as to render the immediate presence to things external to one another graspable by us—without, however, being permitted to attribute any one of these determinations to God as something cognized in him). When I fix the causality of the human being with respect to certain products, explicable only through deliberate purposiveness, by conceiving it as an understanding belonging to him: then I need not stop short there, but may attribute this predicate to him as a well-known property of his, and thereby cognize him. For I am aware that intuitions present themselves to the human being's senses and are, by the understanding, brought under a concept and therewith under a rule; that this concept holds only the common mark (letting the particular fall away) and is thus discursive; that the rules under which given representations get subsumed within a consciousness in general are furnished by it even ahead of those intuitions, and so on: this property, then, I attribute to the human being as one whereby I cognize him. Now if I wish to think a supersensible being (God) as intelligence, this is, in a certain regard of my use of reason, not merely permitted but also unavoidable; but to flatter oneself that one may attribute understanding to it and, thereby, be able to cognize it as by a property of its own is by no means permitted: because I should then be forced to drop every one of those conditions under which alone an understanding is known to me, so that the predicate serving only for the determination of the human being cannot be referred to a supersensible object at all, and thus, by a causality so determined, what God is cannot be cognized in the slightest. And it stands the same way with all the categories, which can bear no meaning for cognition in the theoretical respect unless they are brought to bear on objects of possible experience. — But on the analogy with an understanding I can—indeed I must—in a certain other respect think a supersensible being for myself, without on that account meaning to cognize it theoretically; namely when this determining of its causality bears on an effect in the world that involves a purpose morally necessary yet unachievable by beings of sense: for in that case a cognition of God and of his existence (theology) becomes possible through properties and determinations of his causality thought in him merely on the analogy, which, in a practical bearing—but also only with regard to this (as moral)—possesses all the reality required. — An ethico-theology is thus indeed possible; for morality can, with its rule, get on without theology, but not with the final purpose that this very rule imposes—not, that is, without leaving reason destitute as regards that purpose. But a theological ethics (of pure reason) is impossible: because laws that reason does not, from the outset, give of itself, and whose observance it does not, as a pure practical faculty, also effect, cannot be moral. In the same way a theological physics would be an absurdity, since it would propound not laws of nature but ordinances of a supreme will; whereas a physical (properly, physical-teleological) theology can at least serve as a propaedeutic to theology proper: inasmuch as, by way of contemplating the natural ends of which it offers rich material, it gives occasion for the idea of a final end that nature cannot set up; and hence, while it can indeed make felt the need for a theology that would fix the concept of God with enough determinacy for reason's highest practical employment, it cannot itself bring that theology forth, nor ground it adequately upon its evidences.