Kant on His Way towards a Demonstration of God’s Existence, or One Unfortunate Postulate

Abstract

After having criticized the traditional arguments for the existence of God, Kant in his Critique of Practical Reason attempted to prove the moral necessity of postulating the existence of a supreme divine personality as a precondition for the realization of the “derivative highest good”, which is conceived as a necessary connection between virtue and beatitude/happiness of finite creatures in proportion to this virtue. Ontological and cosmological arguments are replaced by that of ethico-theology which appeals to the conditions of fulfilment of moral laws as well as to the sense of human happiness. The paper deals with the internal logic of Kant’s argument and with the problems it presents within the context of Kantian moral theory. A two-part concept of the derivative highest good, connecting virtue to happiness, could hardly comply with this context. The genuinely Kantian account of happiness/beatitude as an essentially indefinite ideal “not of reason, but of imagination”, giving rise to an anti-eudemonistc moral doctrine in which the highest good is only an unconditionally good will, is hardly unifiable with any request for metaphysical and theological warranties for a happiness well-proportioned to personal virtue. The final realization of the highest ethical good excludes struggle and therefore Kantian virtue as moral mentality in struggle. Finally, the Christian doctrine of God, the acknowledgement of which the philosopher of Koenigsberg claims to be necessary for purely moral reasons, does not contain neither promises nor warranties of beatitude in the wёide sense of the notion, but shares the strictly rigorist stance of Kantian morals. The ethical theory with a monomial notion of highest good does in fact dismiss the problem of theodicy; a two-part notion of highest good revivifies the problem of theodicy in the least promising of its possible versions; e. g. grace in this new theodicy is replaced by morality. The constructions in the field of philosophy of religion by posterior German idealists had mostly left this strange postulative argument Kants aside.