A Sense of Divinity - Descartes and Kant

The fourth programme of Adrian Moore's 'A History of the Infinite' (BBC R4, 2016) discusses the views of Rene Descartes in the sixteenth century, and also the views of philosophers from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. I haven’t added up the number of centuries of thought which have not been discussed at all, but so far argument has been drawn from the sixth century B.C.E. (Pythagoras) fourth century B.C.E. (Aristotle, Zeno), the third century C.E. (Plotinus), the 13^th century C.E. (Aquinas), and the 16^th century C.E. (Bruno). Which is a journey of around twenty centuries. 

It isn’t that there is nothing to say about the idea of infinity during those long centuries, but that where Moore is going determined his selection of evidence and argument. He wants to talk mainly about the role and history of infinity in mathematics and in physics, and the fascinating paradoxes and problems which later investigation has thrown up. And a little about religious faith and the infinite. The first episodes are therefore a necessary introduction to set the scene.  

As he puts it in the text introduction to this episode, 'we have arrived at a time where people think about these things as we now do.' A telling statement, which hints at the richness and strangeness of the unexplored territory between the sixth century B.C.E. and the sixteenth century C.E., and that most of it is best skipped over as quickly as possible. It also lets us know that he has a normative view of human thought, and that what he thinks is rational and reasonable is mostly to be found in modern times. His is the Enlightenment agenda, which he mentions during this episode. 

Descartes famous ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’ (‘I think therefore I am’) is mentioned in the context of Descartes massive reduction of all the ideas and beliefs which he could accept unequivocally as true. He engaged in this reduction in order not to rely on tradition and authority, but on the intellectual resources available to the finite human mind. The question of whether the infinite can be grasped at all by the human mind is discussed, since we cannot see it or touch it. It is hard for us to know it, because it is the infinite. Descartes is quoted as saying that you cannot put your arms around a mountain as you can around a tree. So our knowledge of the infinite is necessarily less intimate than our knowledge of finite things.  

In the next part, the relationship between Descartes confidence in his own existence and capacity to think (expressed in the ‘cogito’) and his understanding of the infinite nature of God, is less than clear. It is true that Descartes suggested that he might have an idea of an infinitely perfect, infinitely powerful God because God put that idea into his mind. That might be the case. Alternatively, it may be that you as a finite being do not have to have an intimate acquaintance with the infinite in order to understand what you are talking about.  

Moore does not use the expression which Descartes employed to explain why it was not necessary to have intimate knowledge of something in order to have a useful and intelligible idea of what it is. He used ‘clear and distinct’ idea to indicate when he had such a useful and intelligible notion of what he was talking about. Later, Bertrand Russell would reformulate the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description (in his Problems of Philosophy). So, by ‘clear and distinct ideas’ about God Descartes is relying on a description of what is, which means that he could be sure what he meant, and that his idea of God was a rational idea.  

In fact, Descartes idea of his own finite reality was dependent on his certainty of the reality of an infinite God. If he could conceive of such a God clearly and distinctly, then it was likely that such a God was real. 

Moore skips on to the second half of the eighteenth century, mentioning Berkeley (‘there is no such thing as the 10,000 part of an inch’ is all that is said), and Hume also, in connection with the indivisibility of reality (the disappearing inkspot when seen from sufficient distance, which is a matter of perception and experience rather than indivisibility per se). Berkeley was an idealist philosopher, who held that the only reason the world is perceptible is because it is held in the mind of God. He also denied materiality, at least as a metaphysical concept. 

Finally Moore discusses a narrow aspect of Kant’s understanding of the idea of infinity. This final part of the episode represents a highly misleading understanding of Kant. 

Moore argues that Kant agreed with Descartes that we have a clear idea of the infinite (the nearest he gets to the Cartesian formulation ‘things which are clear and distinct’). But that our idea is limited to what we can experience and perhaps what we can invest faith in. Really? I don’t think it is.  Did Kant say that knowledge is confined to the five senses? And if we don’t understand knowledge this way, we leave solid ground and end up in metaphysics? That is what seems to be suggested at this point in the series. 

One of Kant’s principal interests was metaphysics, and how we apprehend things and have knowledge of them. Hume’s empiricism was one of the things which impelled Kant to write some of his most important works (The Critique of Pure Reason, and The Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics which may Present itself as a Science). It isn’t the case that Kant thought our ideas are limited to what we can experience in terms of the senses, but instead what is intelligible to us is interpreted through the categories of our understanding. He sought to understand shape and form without these things being associated with form possessing scalar values and spatial angles, which are matters of experience. In that he was very close indeed to Plato’s understanding of the Platonic forms. 

Kant, a figure so important to the concept of reason, is quoted as saying that ‘I go beyond knowledge to make room for faith’. It is true that Kant had the idea that rational thought and reason did not have to exclude a life of faith. It had space in which to exist. But it does not mean that Kant thought that faith was important to the life of reason. For Kant, like Pythagoras and Plato, knowledge is not gained through knowledge of sensible things, but is acquired by the contemplation of things which have a transcendent reality. This isn’t something which everyone can do, or will ever be able to do. Since there is an equation between the Divine and the Infinite, what Kant is doing is leaving space for some sort of understanding of the Divine for those who will never have a genuine understanding of transcendental reality and the Infinite. He is not arguing that faith creates a functional connection with the Infinite.

Karl Lōwith wrote that, in his book Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant had

interpreted the whole history of Christianity as a gradual advance from a religion of revelation to a religion of reason…. It is the most advanced expression of the Christian faith for the very reason that it eliminates the irrational presupposition of faith and grace.    

Moore then turns to Kant’s conception of the moral law. Aspects of the life of the mind which put us in contact with the infinite are about our reason, our rationality. Our reason enables us to grasp the moral law, which gives us infinite dignity (since we are rational beings). He says that “the moral law is what ought to direct us in all we do, with infinite respect granted to fellow rational beings”.

Which explains little. The origin of Kant’s moral law may be the idea that the life of reason, and rationality itself (as he defined it) is about connecting with the infinite. If man is truly rational, then he is connected with the Infinite (the ancient concept of the soul, as discussed by Plato, is related to this idea). But we need to accept Kant’s understanding of what reason is, and not distort it by saying knowledge is obtained through the five senses. Through this distortion, what Moore is left with is the Calvinist notion of a ‘sensus divinitatis’ (sense of divinity).  Which is a poor substitute for the kind of engagement with divinity which was understood to be possible in the ancient world. Such engagement was not achieved through knowledge of the world of the five senses or space and time.

A Mesopotamian Perspective on the Origins of Philosophy

(An extract from correspondence with the philosopher Adrian W. Moore, concerning The History of the Infinite).

From: Thomas Yaeger

Sent: 16 April 2017 18:46

To: Adrian W. Moore

Cc: Thomas Yaeger 

Subject: A History of the Infinite, and The Sacred History of Being

Dear Adrian,

I still haven't got round to writing a compact review of your radio series on 'The History of the Infinite', but I will get around to it eventually. In the meantime the ten episode summaries have been accessed 1266 times as of this afternoon, which is not bad for a blog page on such a specialised subject.

When we were corresponding last autumn about the series, I didn't say much about myself. I have a background in philosophy, classics, and also ancient Near Eastern History. I studied mainly at UCL and SOAS. I was particularly interested in your series in order to understand how the question of the infinite in history is currently being handled by academia. The series gave me an excellent overview of that, for which thanks.

However, there are real problems with the current and conventional view of how the infinite was understood by ancient civilizations, the cultural function it served, its geographic spread, and who adopted it first. It doesn't look problematic from the point of view of those academics who specialise in ancient Greece and classical civilization, because they have grown up with the idea that the business of dealing with abstractions in a philosophical way is firmly established as a Greek phenomenon, and an incontrovertible fact.

Most of the evidence to the contrary never passes before the eyes of classicists and specialists in ancient philosophy, precisely because they are specialists in their subject. The evidence is elsewhere. In addition, we select the evidence which is available, in order to provide support for the current model of how the practice of philosophy started, how ideas of infinity and Being came to be discussed, and not to undermine that view. This process has been going on since the Enlightenment.

Since I studied Mesopotamian history, culture and thought, I have a different perspective. I spent quite a few years in careful study, and came to the conclusion that the origin of philosophy is not down to some autocthonous burst of intellectual genius in ancient Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries, B.C.E, but is the result of the development of patterns of though associated with divine cult around the Mediterranean during the 1st and 2nd millennia B.C.E.

So you have looked at the history of the infinite from the point of view of the established history of philosophy. I have looked at the history of the infinite from the point of view of other cultures around the Mediterranean, principally the Assyrian and Babylonian oikumene, and Israel. As a consequence, our pictures of the cultural history of the idea of infinity are radically different.

It is true that we have no formal discussion of philosophy from Mesopotamia as we find in the pages of Plato and Aristotle, but we know that the ideas of infinity and Being were present because so much information survives about Mesopotamian culture in the form of historical records, ritual texts, liturgies for their festivals, their art, iconography, sculpture, etc. And their extensive literature. These things give us many clues as to the meaning and purpose of divine cult in Mesopotamia. The questions and conjectures that underpin divine cult are philosophical ones about the nature of the infinite, the nature of reality itself, and of Being. 

In fact, it is philosophy in Greece which seems oddly isolated, as not being closely associated with Greek religious practice, and with the other phenomena which form part of their extensive cultural life – divination, augury, magic, sacrifice, the worship of divine images and statues, and the rituals of everyday life.

This isolation of philosophy in Greece from Greek cultic life is more apparent than real however. For 150 years in the 1st Millennium B.C.E. (7th and 8th centuries), Assyria is the best documented civilization in antiquity. Many things survive from there which do not survive elsewhere, such as rituals for the inauguration of divine images. We have none from Greece. Close comparison of these ritual texts with Plato’s discussion of the Forms, spread across several of his dialogues, shows that he is talking about a widely-spread philosophical rationale for divine cult, and in fact the theory and practice of idolatry. The parallels are very striking. 

I’ve written a book on the subject – The Sacred History of Being (2015). This looks at why we frame our intellectual history the way we do, and sketches out an alternative construction of that history.  I would be happy to send this to you, if you would be interested in an alternative view of the history of the infinite, which explores the idea in its original cultural context.

Currently it is available as an eBook, and can be read using Adobe Digital Editions (freely downloadable from Adobe’s website) which is available for a wide range of hardware platforms. It is around 3.5 mb in size, and travels well as an email attachment.

Best regards,

Thomas Yaeger

At 10:52 17/04/2017, you wrote:

Dear Thomas,

Many thanks for your message.  Yes, I would be very interested in receiving a copy of your book, and I thank you in anticipation.

Best wishes,

Adrian Moore

Episodes of my BBC Radio 4 series A History of the Infinite can be heard at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07wr1lz

Dear Adrian,

Ok then. The ePub format file is attached.

I would recommend reading the chapters in sequence on the first reading, since many of the chapters supply information which is useful for understanding subsequent chapters. As you will see from the chapter list, much of the Mesopotamian discussion is in part three.

The main purpose of the book is to bring to the attention of specialists in western philosophy, classics, and ancient history, the presence of  ideas in Assyria and Babylon which show strong parallels with those present in Greece. So the reader is at no point hit with a wall of cuneiform script. Or indeed, any at all. The quality of the writing has already been commended - I worked hard to make the text readable.

Take your time - you have other things to do, and I can wait until you are ready to respond. Thanks for your interest.

Best regards,

Thomas Yaeger.

***

[Evading the Infinite, the chapter published in 'Man and the Divine',  a critical review of both Moore's BBC series on Radio 4, and his argument,  is available at: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2017/10/obscured-by-clouds-critical-review-of.html]

Page updated October 5, 2018.