Is truth subjective or objective?

Foxfyre, I recall Kant saying something about his sense of eternity, but not an explicit statement of belief in a diety. Spinosa, bless his heart, never gave in to social pressures at all in this regard.

foxyfyre

He said he believed. He used the concept of God, but not in his first Critic, only in the second, Critic of Pratical Reason, because he needed that concept to his moral philosophy.
But don't forget that the authorities forbidden Kant to speak in his books about God. In those times, specially in German, it was not easy for someone to declare himself atheist.
But even today's specialists have difficulty in reaching a conclusion about the question of Kant being sincerily theist, or not.

Val, that sounds right. Thanks

Although Kant wrote about religion in his Second Critique, he explicitly framed his moral philosophy in a fashion that would not require belief in any deity. That's because Kant held that the categorical imperative was true a priori rather than true as a matter of faith or as received wisdom.


I have no doubt that Kant was a sincerely devout Christian.

Joe

Don't forget that Kant says that he must "postulate the existence of God as necessarily inherent to the possibility of the sovereign good (object of our will that is necessarily related to the moral legislation of the pure reason)" - Critic of Pratical Reason, chapter II, V.
Sorry for the poor translation.

Did Kant assign God to the realm of the noumena? That might explain, in his terms, why we can have no empirical evidence of His existence.

Nobody

I think so. But in the Critic of the Pratical Reason.
As you know, my deep admiration for Kant, has to do with the first Critic, The Critic of the Pure Reason (his first philosophy great work, written when he was 57 years old). And I think that philosophers like Schoppenauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and even the positivists, have the same opinion.

Temporal truth is different to the idea of "divine truth" which must be separated. Individual truth is based upon perceptions and ignorance or knowledge, and thus alters. Divine truth is an embracement of a higher being, and cannot be contained in a worldly context. We are merely flies trapped in jars.

Kant, I think, had a rather complicated view of the interplay between religion and morality. For Kant, it was important to develop a system of morality that did not depend upon a belief in a supreme being -- not only because Kant was attempting to construct a system that applied to all humanity, but also because he believed that a person cannot act morally if he only acts to please god. Thus his categorical imperative doesn't mention god at all: people act morally only if they act in accordance with the categorical imperative.

On the other hand, Kant firmly believed that a belief in god was logically necessary. As such, someone would be acting illogically if he did not believe in a supreme being. So one could not be considered a rational human being if one followed the categorical imperative but remained an atheist -- not because morality depended upon a belief in god, but because both morality and the belief in god were derivable from reason alone.

Very good, Joe. But let me ask: if belief in God, according to Kant, is a logical necessity, is this necessity of the same "strength" as Kant's attrilbution to us of a priori perceptions of space and time? What I'm leading to is the notion that space and time, as understood in Kant's time, is theoretically (and this is more than just logically) different in post-Einsteinian times. Did Kant insist (as would any rationalist) that the "logical necessity" of God, space and time are immutable, never to be outdated?

Nobody

About space and time, Kant's conception was newtonian and euclidean. Remember he started teaching physics, not philosophy.
But I think we can read Kant's conception, accorded to modern perspectives of space and time. Space and time are not "fenomena" - nor "noumena"-, they are the initial conditions of our perception. Let's say, they are like a computer program. Since we cannot experience space or time, the physical conception we have about them doesn't change Kant's theory.

I'm not sure if the knowledge of God's existence is on a level with our knowledge of time and space. I haven't really read a whole lot of Kant's religious philosophy (it just doesn't interest me), so I'd only be guessing.

Val, I think you're right. My phrasing was not good, i.e., "a priori perceptions of space and time". I do prefer your "the initial conditions of our perception." Your version reminds me of our grammar: we do not "say" grammar, as we say words. Grammar is an essential condition for our use of words.

JLN,

I'm battling with Kant at an evening class.

Whereas I understand his a priori stance on perception I cannot go with any concept of "noumena" because this implies independent existence of "something" extrinsic to particular observers.

As I see it, all there "is" is an interactive process which involves a dynamic interchange across some sort of structural boundary. For convenience we might call that the boundary between "inner and outer states" but neither is defineable without the other. Such a boundary can operate at many levels* ...cell/environment....self/world.... etc and "language" operates at the higher (cognitive) level as an "agent of structure" in as much as it sets the aggenda for transient boundary conditions as seen from "within". Language is thus part of the "dynamic" beacuse it always operates within a communicative process including "an evolving self with itself".

You will note that the above is something of an exercise in personal idea sorting (along the lines of Capra) but it seemed appropriate at this point in the thread.

*(Math reference to "Chaos Theory")

Our language is limited to what we can perceive in our "visual" world.

C.I. and to some extent the content of our perceptual field is shaped by our language.

Fresco, I agree, as you know, that knowleldge is a function of the knower, meaning that our conceptualizations of the world reflect our interactions with the world (which is essentially what we are; ultimately there is no "structural boundary" separating inside/outside, self/world, etc). The situation is replete with contradictions, and all "accurate" representations of the situation must therefore be paradoxical. Nevertheless, we cannot operate without the pragmatic myths imposed on us by our interests, language, culture and neurological constitutions.
I wonder what reason Kant had for his presumably "pragmatic myth" (heuristic hypothetical construct) of the dualism, noumena/phenomena. Maybe it was not merely hypothetical and pragmatic for him. Despite his condemnation of metaphysics, this distinction might be taken as purely metaphysical in nature.
When I talk about the Hindu notion of Brahma(n), I am clearly referring to something that has the unknowable yet "objective" quality Kant ascribes to the noumena. At the same time Brahma is a monistic concept that includes all things; it contains no ultimate or objective distinctions (it doesn't even warrant the conceptual distinction between monism and pluralism). Even the megazillian atmans that refer metaphorically to the countless points of concsciouness in the Cosmos are not distinct from Brahma. Language is both our lantern and our blinder. I like Nagarjuna's treatment of such diliemmas. Perhaps I should go futher into Wittgenstein, who, according to many, is compatible with Nagarjuna.

Quote, " Language is both our lantern and our blinder." I like this statement.

I'm not sure I understand the above discussion, but...

If belief=truth, so that we each live in our own world of truth, how can anyone really agree? You can say that that thing you have in your world is comparable in mine, but it is not the same thing, because it is not the same belief. You definately could not disagree, because different ideas about reality would simply be differences in the world that people experience. It would be like someone on earth saying that the sun is yellow, and someone in another solar system saying no, the sun is red. They are different suns, so it is just cooincidence that they are the same color.

I think that there is an objective truth. If there were not, we could not agree or disagree.

JLN,

Your exposition of Brahma is useful to me as third party support. I think you will find that Wittgenstein dwells on language as a "blinder". For example, his discussion of "has" as in "John has a pain" versus "John has a dog" exposes the philosophical nonsense which can ensue by the assumption that the "same word" is operating in the two sentences.
However, W still relies on what I would call "disembodied sentences" i.e. "sentences out of context". IMO even though W raises the issue of "functional similarity" he does not proceed further to an investigation of "communication" (...in what situations would we actually say that about John ...and note even the choice of some neutral "John" is artificial !) . For me the import of any utterance cannot be investigated ouside the dynamic context within which it occurs. Such an attempt would be like trying to examine a snowflake with warm hands.

catquas,

If you can follow the any of above you might agree that "same" could merely imply "mutual context for observers".