PART 5 - The Cartesian cogito and Kant's Copernican revolution - At the origins of modernism
What Concept of God is Deduced from Cartesian "Cogito"?
Bontadini outlines well the ultimate consequence of Cartesian cogito which fully manifests in the philosophy of Hegel and Gentile, for whom I do not find myself facing a "you" other than me independent of me, above me, a divine "You" who created me, upon whom my existence depends, a "You" with whom I can dialogue, to whom I speak and who speaks to me, a "You" whom I can love and who loves me.
Nor do I find myself facing people similar to me. However, they are independent of me, not produced by me, but creatures of God like me, with whom I can also enter into a relationship of dialogue, love, and collaboration. None of this, because Bontadini reminds us that in the vision of absolute idealism shared by him:[1]
"thought does not need guarantees; it is already a guarantee of its value, measure, and foundation. This is a truth, without which one does not enter the sanctuary of philosophy, a fundamental and prejudicial truth to any other, and at the same time, how fitting, simple, and undeniableas!"[2]
What is this "thought that needs no guarantees" and is already "a guarantee of its value, measure, foundation"? We had already encountered this when we discussed the outcome and the ultimate meaning of the Cartesian I am explained by Fichte: it is my thought, my act of thinking coincident with my ego, thought that coincides with my being, with my act of being, so that I am thought and identically I am being. I am not placed or created by anyone because I am the one who, with my thoughts, posits my being and the very being of every being. This is the metaphysics that emerges from Descartes through Kant and Hegel.
For Bontadini, this entails the need to "overcome the opposite prejudice – widespread and deeply rooted in the minds of young people – an 'imagination' that there is on one side being and on the other thought as two spheres or two orders in themselves," an obvious reference to realism.
At this point, we ask ourselves: if thought is identical to being, if I am being and I am thought, what about the problem of the existence of God? All idealists, from Descartes to Kant to Hegel to Gentile to Bontadini, talk about God and are convinced of the existence of God, indeed they believe they know Him better than realists, accused of having a naive, archaic, coarse, and anthropomorphic view of God.
The idealist admits the existence of God, but with this difference from the realist: for the latter, God is a personal "You" distinct from him and his creator, a transcendent being external to his thought, while for the idealist, since for him being is inherent to his thought, God is me, not in the empirical sense, but ultimately, transcendental and absolute.
So, I wonder: how does the idealist enter a relationship with God and others? How does he establish this relationship? If God and others are a projection of his ego, one of its ideas, if they are posited by him, in him, and for him, if everything is based on his ego, if everything starts from his ego and returns to his ego, how should the relationship with God be conceived?
Clearly, given that God is everything and everything must be ordered towards God, everyone and everything must be ordered to the idealist because he is the principle of everything, the apex, the center of everything. Hence the typical selfishness and egocentrism of the idealist. Everyone must serve Him and cater to His interests because they find in Him the purpose of their lives and happiness.
Realism and idealism, aside from the fact of intentionality, which the idealist then confuses with being - and we're back to square one - cannot be synthesized or harmonized. Realism and idealism are not at all two different and complementary ways of approaching reality. It is not a matter of playing two different roles as if one were a theater actor or speaking two different languages like a tour guide. Philosophizing is not, as a fellow philosopher of mine imprudently said, "playing on two registers," now that of realism, sometimes that of idealism.
If it is true, as reported by Virgilio Melchiorre [3], that the Catholic University of Milan wanted to be "from the beginning a place for an original combination of the ancient" (St. Thomas) "with the modern" (Kant); if it is true that it started from Joseph Maréchal who "tried to mediate Thomistic transcendentalism with Kantian transcendentalism," it must be said that it started on the wrong foot and the most conspicuous fruits of this unfortunate operation could be seen in Emanuele Severino's eternalist monism.
Maritain was right when he said that one must choose between realism and idealism as one chooses between true and false [4]. However, this does not mean that one should not, through serious critical examination in the light of Thomism, highlight the valid points of Kantian thought. The right track for such work is not the transcendental cogito (“I think”), but the thing (res) as a noumenon. Hence the keystone offered by Italo Mancini [5] allows us to speak of a Kantian theology, the Kantian dictum that he rightly placed at the beginning of his book: "Gott ist kein Apprehensibler, sondern nur denkbarer Gegenstand."(God is not an apprehensible object, but only a thinkable one." [6]
This is Kant's distinction between knowing (erkennen) and thinking (denken). So, he agrees with the "transcendental object," which is the "thing," corresponding to Thomistic res. Instead, the "transcendental apperception" corresponds to the Cartesian cogito and must be rejected.
Unfortunately, Maréchal does not make this distinction. Instead of bringing Kant back to Thomistic realism, he turns Thomas into an idealist. On this line, which is Maréchal's, is Rahner, for whom his transcendentalism is not Thomistic but Cartesian and even Hegelian, identifying thought with being.
From Kant's transcendental (idealism), Heidegger took inspiration to argue for the presence in Kant's thought of a "pre-understanding of being" (Vorverständnis des seins) [7]. This interpretation is valid when interpreting the "Kantian thing" as being (sein). However, I'm not sure how reliable such an interpretation is. Kant, in fact, never speaks of being (esse).
Rahner takes up Heidegger with his concept of Vorgriff but ends up interpreting being in a Hegelian sense as the identity of thought and being. However, since Heidegger interprets Kant's transcendental in terms of the transcendental object, then an approach of sein to a Thomistic transcendental being is possible, and a link between St. Thomas and Kant is possible.
However, it must be remembered that between the primacy of the idea over reality and the primacy of reality over the idea, one must choose the latter, as Pope Francis asserted from the beginning of his pontificate [8]. Identifying thought with being, and reality with the ideal, means identifying man with God.
To believe that thought can posit being equates to believing that man can produce God by merely thinking of Him, as God is nothing but a thought of man, so God becomes, to use biblical language, an idol, "made by human hands." Then Feuerbach is right to say that God does not exist and is merely a product of the human imagination.
Feuerbach's only mistake is that this God, a simple idea of reason, is not the true God, the ipsum Esse per se subsistens, but is indeed a figment of the mind, "(this God) has a mouth and does not speak, he has eyes and does not see, ears and does not hear, nostrils and does not smell, hands and does not feel, feet and does not walk, from their throat no sounds come. Let them be like him, those who make him and all who trust him" (Psalm 115:4-8).
Realism and Idealism
The difference between realism and idealism is clear and is suggested by the very terms that define them. Assuming the existence of intellect, idea, and reality, while the realist maintains that the intellect grasps reality through the idea, the idealist believes that reality coincides with the idea, and therefore says that the object of the intellect is the idea or reality is the same thing. Thus, while for the realist, the truth lies in conforming to reality, for the idealist, it lies in conforming to the idea.
The realist believes that the intellect immediately grasps reality and forms the idea or concept of the real to represent it. Subsequently, consciousness reflexively grasps, as its object, the concept formed by the intellect. The idealist, on the other hand, believes that he can immediately start from consciousness having the idea of the real as its object, and then believes he can derive reality from the idea.
Idealism, in general, is certainly a value that highlights sensitivity to thought and spirit. However, it is necessary to distinguish between two fundamental types of idealism, one certainly noble and commendable, a principle of virtue and moral perfection; the other, fallacious and blameworthy, a principle of duplicity and moral dissolution.
The first is Platonic idealism, which posits that the idea is divine, subsisting, objective, transcendent, the rule of truth, and the model of reality and right action. This idealism aligns perfectly with realism because the idea is not my idea; it is not a representation but an absolute and subsistent divine idea.
Instead, in Cartesian idealism, the idea is my idea, a priori idea, or the original content of my consciousness. I equate being with being thought and do not admit a being outside my thoughts. In this way, the idealist equates human thought with divine thought and falls into Gnosticism.
For the Cartesian idealist, the object of metaphysics is not the entity but the self, not the being but the cogito-sum. Therefore, reality, the thing-in-itself, the entity is not before me, independent of me, above me. Reality is what I think, it is my idea of reality. What I think is what is, not because I have adapted to what is, but because what is, is what I think. It is not me who depends on reality, but reality depends on me. Therefore, if God exists, He exists not as my creator, but because I think Him.
For the idealist, the transcendental is not the entity, but it is I. This is Kant's Copernican revolution. Kant calls "transcendental" not the knowledge of the entity but Cartesian self-awareness, which in him takes the form of what he calls the "critique of pure reason," in which I examine my a priori ideas that are both the object of my knowledge and how I give shape to that object, as Kant says:
"I call transcendental any knowledge that deals not with objects," i.e., material things, phenomena, "but with our mode of knowledge of objects, insofar as this must be possible a priori." Now Kant, by "mode" of knowing, means precisely the contents of "pure reason," the a priori ideas, and the "pure concepts a priori," which for him give shape to the object or to the phenomenon. "A system of such concepts would be called transcendental philosophy." [9]
Kant presents this science as a simple "introduction to the system of pure reason. Such a science should not yet be called doctrine, but only critique of pure reason." According to Kant, it would only have the task of "purifying our reason and freeing it from errors," especially, as Kant will later say, those of realism, which believes that things in themselves are knowable, that truth consists in conforming to the object, rather than adjusting the object to the subject, realism that thinks to obtain a metaphysics starting from experience and believes that speculative reason can demonstrate the existence of God.
However, Kant did not build that "doctrine," that is, that metaphysics as a science, which should have been possible based on that "introduction." Indeed this, as he also said in the Prolegomena [10], should serve only to lay the conditions of the possibility of metaphysics as a science. Instead, Fichte and Schelling interpreted Kantian transcendental philosophy as a true and proper foundational science replacing realistic metaphysics.
Thus, Kantian idealists began to speak, with Schelling, of "transcendental idealism," taking the term from realistic metaphysics but falsifying its meaning because properly the true transcendental is not the self or the sum, but the entity. True transcendental philosophy is therefore not Kantian transcendental philosophy but Thomistic metaphysics.
As for the realist, the object of thought is the entity or being or extramental reality. For the idealist, it is the self, the consciousness being, i.e., the thought. For the realist, the thinkable exists, outside of thought; for the idealist, there is no thinkable, but only the thought; all being is immanent to thought.
For the realist, thought reaches the entity that is outside while remaining an immanent act to the spirit; for the idealist, there is no entity outside of thought, so he also recognizes the immanence of the cognitive act, but for him, the object of this act is the same thought because he identifies thinking with being. For the former, being transcends thought; for the idealist thought, as Bontadini says, is untranscendable because it does not think of an external and transcendent being, but thinks of the thought, as Husserl says, even if thought as transcendent.
For the realist, the intellect produces the concept of the thing, but not the thing itself. The thing is found in experience. The thing is created by God. For the idealist, thought produces the thing itself because, for him, the concept of the thing is the thing, as Hegel maintains. For this reason, while the realist acknowledges God as the creator, the idealist puts himself in the place of God, considering himself the creator of things. Indeed, as Gentile says, following Fichte, who says that the self posits itself and the non-self, the self creates itself ("autoctisi").
For the realist, reality consists of the things that are in front of and around him, or his self, his body, and his soul, things he sees, touches, feels, and understands, things presupposed before his knowledge of them, things existing before him and independently of him, which leads him to wonder who made them, who caused them, where they come from, what they are for, and what purpose they serve or tend toward.
I become aware of having in mind the things I know; I realize that I have an idea or a mental representation of them. If the thing I know or think about is in my mind, I must deduce that I have the idea or representation of it in my mind because, as Aristotle already observed, it is not the stone that is in the soul, but the image of the stone.
So if I have in mind that thing that is outside of me in its concrete being and existence, I cannot admit the absurdity that that thing is in my mind with the materiality that it possesses outside of me, but I must admit that it is present in me in some dematerialized way. Hence the immateriality and spirituality of the cognitive act.
This means that in the process of knowing, I come into contact with the thing through my senses and hold an immaterial representation of it in my mind as an idea I've formed of the thing itself. In this way, I find the thing in mind, and I note that what I have in mind corresponds to what the thing is outside of me.
The idealist objectifies the idea and at the same time, he derealizes the entity, as Berkeley does. He dematerializes matter and materializes thought. For this reason, Locke admits the possibility of thinking matter. From Descartes' res cogitans arises the man-machine, La Mettrie's res extensa; Darwin confuses man with the animal.
Today, the distinguished scientist Federico Faggin expresses the following important considerations:
"For years I have unsuccessfully tried to understand how consciousness could arise from electrical or biochemical signals and I have found that invariably electrical signals can only produce other electrical signals or other physical consequences like force or movement, but never sensations and feelings, which are qualitatively different. It is consciousness that understands the situation and that makes the difference between a robot and a human being. In a machine, there is no 'pause for reflection' between symbols and action because the meaning of the symbols, doubt, and free will exist only in the consciousness of a self, but not in a mechanism." [11]
The idealist, exemplified by Bontadini, never clearly explains what he means by "being" and "thought." He always speaks of them in an indefinite, absolute sense, always playing on ambiguity, without ever clarifying and specifying the analogical sense, that is, the difference between human thinking and divine thinking, between human being and divine being. Thus, without openly stating it and cunningly and dishonestly, he promotes gnosticism and pantheism, confusing human knowledge with divine knowledge and human being with divine being.
The idealist knows what the spirit is. He moves comfortably in the themes of truth, science, knowledge, objectivity, personhood, reason, self, thought, immanence, logic, freedom, consciousness, universality, conceptuality, ideality, and dialectic.
He willingly uses metaphysical notions such as identity, the transcendental, transcendence, being, essence, individuality, existence, necessity, relation, form, unity, totality, and the absolute.
He shows speculative deficiencies, however, in the themes of entity, substance, accident, analogy, soul, intellect, causality, and matter. He does not disdain to talk about God, the eternal, the immutable, the simple, the All, and the infinite. Indeed, he is certain that he knows who God is better than the realist, the Church, and Jesus Christ.
The idealist believes that it is he, not the realist, who provides the proof of God's existence. He thinks that if the idea of God is not originally in his consciousness, starting from the experience of external things, reason does not arrive at proving its existence. This is because he believes that in this way, reason only moves among phenomena, while God is among things themselves, like the unconditional that closes the series of conditioned things. This discourse emerges clearly from what Kant says in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. [12]
Kant takes up the enterprise of Descartes, although he does not name him. But he does the same thing that Descartes does about realist metaphysics. Kant's Copernican revolution, which posits that objects are regulated by the subject, mirrors Descartes' methodology. Descartes, skeptical of the senses' reliability, does not use them as the foundation for metaphysics or to prove God's existence. Instead, he begins with the cogito, encompassing the original consciousness of the idea of God.
Kant founds metaphysics in the same way: he rejects realistic metaphysics, which knows the essence of the thing in itself and from it starts as an effect and as proof by which reason demonstrates, applying the principle of causality, the existence of God, but as Descartes did, he founds metaphysics on the "I think" [13] or on the "transcendental apperception", which is the "same intellect". [14]
Just as God is the source of all being and things originate from Him—not the other way around—so Kant, confusing like every idealist the order of being with the order of knowing, does not start from things, as the realist does, to arrive at God, but starts from the idea of God to condition and found the knowledge of things. He only accepts causality as the progression from cause to effect, akin to deduction, and does not accept the reverse progression from effect to cause, which involves induction. For Kant, physics begins with the senses to reach phenomena, whereas metaphysical knowledge commences with intellect as self-consciousness and the idea of God, expanding to encompass all things and the world.
What is the difference between the aim of the realist and that of the idealist? Based on what I have said, the answer is not difficult: the realist wants to convince us that we are creatures of God, of a God who exists in himself outside of us, in front of us, above us, independently of us, before us, and in us.
The idealist, on the other hand, wants to convince us, with the oracular tone of one who reveals our true dignity, that our true being is not at all our empirical self, that we are therefore not at all created by a God distinct from us who resides up there in heaven outside of us and above us, but that we, in the deep, ultimate, and real substance of our self, the transcendental or absolute self, are God, that God whom the realist imagines as a supreme being dwelling in heaven, that God is us.
When Descartes says ego sum, I am, Fichte understood the ultimate and profound meaning of this "I am" when he said that the self, by thinking itself, posits itself and the non-self. Fichte understood that the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am" does not mean: that from the fact that I think, I deduce or realize that I am [15], but when I posit my thought, I posit simultaneously my being. We exist by ourselves. No one posits our being, but we posit it ourselves. And as we define ourselves, so do we posit what lies beyond us. This other is not created by a God other than us, but we posit it ourselves by our thinking. The God of the realist does not exist; it is his imagination. Man, as Marx said, is God for man. And here the idealist meets the materialist, Hegel with Marx. (Bold mine, by the editor.)
From the previous considerations, it is easily understood that the comparison between realism and idealism isn't about pitting the ancient or classical against the modern, with a bias toward the latter (who doesn't favor the modern?). Instead, it is about the contrast between the two attitudes of our intellect, which have lasted and will last throughout history, starting from the unfortunate event of original sin: the perspective of man to replace God in deciding the truth and what is good and evil.
Idealism does not arise with Descartes and Kant, but it is already present in the West with Parmenides [16] and Protagoras and in the East with Hinduism. On the other hand, realism is not a "pre-critical" and outdated attitude because it corresponds to the normal functioning of human reason. Whoever wishes to be modern, a legitimate aspiration must embrace modern realism, integrating its virtues from idealism while discarding its pitfalls. In realism, on the other hand, there are no errors because it is the criterion of truth, which the idealist is obliged to use when he believes what he says is true, i.e., adequate to reality, thus refuting himself.
The idealistic rejection of thought conforming to the object and the claim to regulate the object on the subject is nothing else, on the intellectual level than the claim of man to do not the will of God but his own. While realism is the apology of humility and obedience to God, idealism is the apology of one's self, pride, and disobedience. We finally dare to say things as they are, without so many waltz turns, pretenses, hypocrisies, and cover-ups. It will only be to our advantage.
Fr. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP
Fontanellato, April 8, 2024 - May 7, 2024
Source:
https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/il-cogito-di-cartesio-e-la-rivoluzione_7.html
[1] However, Bontadini professed Catholicism and taught at the Catholic University of Milan. It is not easy to imagine how he managed to reconcile two such opposing conceptions of existence and life. Unfortunately, duplicity is a vice that is also found among us Catholics.
[2] Introduction to the Discourse on Method, La Scuola Publishing House, Brescia 1957, p. XVII.
[3] Various Authors, Studies in Transcendental Philosophy, Vita e Pensiero, Milan 1993, pp. VII-IX.
[4] Les degrés du savoir (Degrees of Knowledge), Desclée de Brouwer, Bruges 1959, p. 195.
[5] Kant and Theology, Cittadella Editrice, Assisi 1975.
[6] God is not apprehensible, but only conceivable.
[7] Kant et le problème de la métaphysique (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics), Editions Gallimard, Paris 1953.
[8] I discussed this pontifical teaching in my article "The Dependence of Idea on Reality in Pope Francis's Evangelii Gaudium," in PATH, 2014/2, pp. 287-316.
[9] Critique, op.cit., p. 58.
[10] See note 28.
[11] 1. Link to the YouTube video of Federico Faggin's lecture:
Link to the ANSA article reporting on Federico Faggin's lecture:
"After retracing the highlights of his professional life, the Italo-American scientist - born in the province of Vicenza but residing in the Silicon Valley for some time - emphasized: 'For years I have been trying in vain to understand how consciousness could arise from electrical or biochemical signals, and I have found that, invariably, electrical signals can only produce other electrical signals or other physical consequences such as force or movement, but never sensations and feelings, which are qualitatively different. It is consciousness that understands the situation and makes the difference between a robot and a human being. In a machine, there is no 'pause for reflection' between symbols and action, because the meaning of symbols, doubt, and free will exist only in the consciousness of a self, but not in a mechanism." The meeting was organized by the Legislative Assembly of Emilia-Romagna, addressed to 35 secondary schools of all the provinces of the Region."
[12] Op.cit., p. 20.
[13] Ibid., p. 141.
[14] Ibid., p. 138.
[15] This was explained by Descartes himself and well understood by Hegel. See Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences in Summary, Laterza Editions, Bari 1963, pp. 72-73.
[16] Parmenides' saying "to autò to noein kai to einai," thinking and being are the same, is the identity of thinking and being that is the fundamental principle of idealism, leading to pantheism and the concept of man as the Absolute Ego.