On this page, I will defend some ideas that I wrote in my thesis, because Klemme, the professor who supervised it, criticized those ideas in his review. In that letter, at one moment, he lies about what I wrote, and at another point, he is playing dumb as if he could not understand anything I wrote. Even though he had read the draft of my thesis and said everything was ok.
First, I will write about the part where Klemme lies:
The moral argument for the assumption of God´s existence and Spinoza
(If you have knowledge of Kant, I recommend reading my essay because I solve a problem that had not been solved before. Had it been solved, you would be able to find the solution in one of the books that appear in the bibliography of my essay. But you will not find it there. My paper is the answer to the question about why, for Kant, reason has an interest in the existence of the ideas. (CJ AE 300)).
In CJ AE 452, Kant talks about the moral argument for assuming the existence of God. Paragraph 87 (CJ AE 452) has the following title "On the moral proof of God´s existence". That is the name of the title, because Kant thinks he can explain a proof of God based on morals, and also at the same time on logic. (This is also explained on the 2nd Critique, in the part concerning the doctrine of the postulates.) One of the arguments is that there must be a suprasensible cause in the world if morals and happiness should be thought as unified, as they are unified under the concept of the highest good, which is a concept of reason. The highest good is, for Kant, a world where happiness and morals coexist. A world where a human being is worthy of that happiness.
Kant is not stupid and admits that following the moral law is not that easy, mostly also because nature very often is not of any help. People have to work their way through the moral path, so to speak. So, Kant gives the example of Spinoza, who was an atheist and is supposed to have been a good man. He says that even if he, Spinoza, were good, he cannot expect that nature lends him a hand. And around him, he will always find deception, violence, and envy. So, Kant says that Spinoza eventually would have to give up his pursuit of the highest good because of the hardships he would encounter, or he would have to admit at least the possibility of the existence of God as a moral creator of the world. If Spinoza admits this, his moral feeling will not become deterred or weakened, so his hope that having good intentions is really worth something will not vanish.
So, for Kant, even if at the beginning when you have to take a moral decision, you are not assuming the value of anything besides the value of the moral law (which for Kant has an absolute value), on the long run your mind will come up with the idea of highest good, and reason will consider it the final end of rational beings, AND the moral law will order to follow it (Critique of Practical Reason Academy Edition 122), and from that moment on, after cultivating your faculties, you cannot help but assume the possibility of the existence of God as the suprasensible link between nature, happiness and morals.
Klemme, who was supervising my work, states in his useless review that I understood everything in the wrong way, and that Kant says rather the contrary. Basically, he is just lying. He has a lot of nerve to do that in a review about a student´s work. I think he just did that to bother me (mainly, because I am right in my thesis).
You can read all this yourself:
1. This is what Kant says about having principles, having faith, and God in one passage of the Critique of Judgment:
“We can thus assume a righteous man (like Spinoza) who takes himself to be firmly convinced that there is no God, and (since with regard to the object of morality it has a similar consequence) there is also no future life: how would he judge his own inner purposive determination by the moral law, which he actively honors? He does not demand any advantage for himself from his conformity to this law, whether in this or in another world; rather, he would merely unselfishly establish the good to which that holy law directs all his powers. But his effort is limited; and from nature he can, to be sure, expect some contingent assistance here and there, but never a lawlike agreement in accordance with constant rules (like his internal maxims are and must be) with the ends to act in behalf of which he still feels himself bound and impelled. Deceit, violence, and envy will always surround him, even though he is himself honest, peaceable, and benevolent [...]. The end, therefore, which this well-intentioned person had and should have had before his eyes in his conformity to the moral law, he would certainly have to give up as impossible; or, if he would remain attached to the appeal of his moral inner vocation and not weaken the respect, by which the law immediately influences him to obedience, by the nullity of the only ideallistic final end that is adequate to its high demand (which cannot occur without damage to the moral disposition)), then he must assume the existence of a moral author of the world, i.e. God [my emphasis, R.G.] from a practical point of view, i.e. in order to form a concept of at least the possibility of the final end that is prescribed to him by morality - which he very well can do, since it is at least not sef-contradictory" (Critique of Judgment Academy Edition 452)
2. This is what I said in my thesis (Pages 55-56):
"What Kant states in the third Critique is the fact that, because of beauty in nature, you have to attribute necessarily purposiveness to nature. We cannot feel awe towards nature and think of it as something that amazes, and at the same time think that everything in it is just contingent. For Kant, beauty and living things could not be explained by Newton or Darwin.
For Kant, we cannot act morally good and think at the same time that there is no God (CJ 452). The awe is connected in a similar way with necessity. The nature outside forces us to view nature as if it were purposive and forces us to value it. If we imagined that everything in nature were contingent, or if we were never able to find principles in it, we would feel a feeling of displeasure, or counterpurposiveness (CJ 188). We would feel that everything in it is contingent and counterpurposive, and we would submerge in an existentialist state of mind. The nausea Sartre talks about can be understood as this counterpurposiveness, as the inhibition of reason´s search for necessity. Behind Kant's thoughts, lies the question of whether we really can believe that there is no final end in the world and no God. We could make such a statement, but Kant would not admit that we could really believe in that and live life following such an idea. A life with principles and without God is, for Kant, not only unimaginable (because of all the counterpurposiveness or displeasure that that would provoke) but also contradictory."
3. This is the useless comment of the professor in that letter about my work (where he is wrong, of course):
“The author states that atheists cannot, from Kant´s point of view, behave morally (S.56), and to support his position, he quotes a passage (Critique of Judgment AA 452). This passage seems to support exactly the opposite of what the author is intending: Even though Spinoza was an atheist, he was a good person."
Not only that, he changed the wording of what I said, he says that I say that atheists, if you follow Kant, cannot behave morally… And it sounds as if I were attacking atheist people, and I am not doing that, and it sounds as if I had misinterpreted not only that paragraph but the whole book.
So you can see for yourself that I was right and that he is wrong, and that for a very strange reason, he did that.
I have done 3 exams about Kant prior to the thesis; he was the teacher of those three classes. Two of those exams were about the Critique of Judgment. It is very unlikely that I would have misunderstood everything.
Now, let´s forget about Klemme, and, just for fun, let´s check another passage because this topic is very interesting. The following quote from the 3rd Critique is very good:
"This moral argument is not meant to provide any objectively valid proof of the existence of God, nor meant to prove to the doubter that there is a God; rather, it is meant to prove that if his moral thinking is to be consistent [the original version says: “wenn er moralisch konsequent denken will”], he must include the assumption of this proposition among the maxims of his practical reason. Thus, it is also not meant to say that it is necessary to assume the happiness of all rational beings in the world in accordance with their morality for morals [for the sake of morals, R.G.], but rather that it is necessary through their morality [because of morals. R.G.]. Hence, it is a subjective argument, sufficient for moral beings."
This all means that, for Kant, you cannot convince anybody alone through this argument about God´s existence and things alike, unless that person acknowledges the moral law. The argument of the moral proof depends on the objective validity of the moral law and is “for moral beings”. So, first, the person has to acknowledge the objective validity of the moral law, and from that moment on, that person has to make the concession about the assumption of God´s possibility, if he wants to be morally consistent [“konsequent”] in his life.
You could say this belief is sort of performative, since it only works as long as you acknowledge the validity of moral law. As if this acknowledgement and the belief were at the same time an act of your will.
These are some of the titles of paragraphs from the Critique of Judgement
87 On the moral proof of the existence of God
88 Restriction of the moral argument
89 On the utility of the moral argument
90 On the kind of affirmation involved in a moral proof of the existence of God
91 On the kind of affirmation produced by means of a practical faith
All this information already appears in the 2nd Critique, and this is reflected in one of the titles Kant chose for one of the chapters in the Critique of Practical Reason :
“The Existence of God as a Postulate of Pure Practical Reason”
Kant says he has not invented this argument, he believes this argument is really a pure logical argument, and it belongs to the structure of reason itself. "This moral proof is not any newly invented argument, but at most only a newly articulated one; for it lay in the human faculty of reason even before its earliest germination, and with the progressive cultivation of that faculty has merely become more developed. As soon as human beings began reflecting on right or wrong..." (CJ AE 458)
You have to consider that, for Kant, reason would not like to order you to follow something that is unreachable because it would be contradicting itself. So the Highest Good should be thought of as reachable, and that is possible thanks to the postulates.
Now, I will talk about the part of the letter where Klemme plays dumb:
Purposiveness vs Nausea
Everybody knows Kant's famous phrase about the starry sky. He says that there are two things that fill your mind with increasing awe: the starry sky and the moral law.
Kant mentions that phrase because of two things. 1st, Kant wants to point out that there is an aesthetic experience that produces awe. This is a very common experience, which is why people upload pictures of that. It is not a requirement to study philosophy to get that feeling. This awe is so strong that, for Kant, it is felt by human beings as a finality. This means it is felt as if that experience (watching the starry sky) were meant to be experienced that way, or as if it were meant to take place. And 2nd, he believes this aesthetic experience is really comparable to a moral experience (like if you were going to save a child during a war, or as if you were witnessing a child being saved in a war), both feelings are very strong, and can produce awe.
For Kant, if you feel there is a finality in something, this means that you are experiencing that as purposive, and as if it had the purpose of producing that feeling of pleasure. That awe in an aesthetic experience, for Kant, is triggered even if you think that you do not have any faith at all in anything.
Now I am going to talk about Sartre´s concept of nausea, which is adequate to this topic (this does not mean that I support all of Sartre´s ideas; for example, I believe he exaggerated with his enthusiasm for socialism. Radical forms of socialism created many problems in Latin America).
Sartre talks about nausea when dealing with counterpurposive experiences, which means that those experiences lack finality or purposiveness: they are not felt as if they were meant to be. This type of experience could be categorized as the opposite of what Kant calls awe. The cool thing is that you can explain that phenomenon using Kant´s terminology. In the novel The Nausea, a person is looking at a tree and its roots, and suddenly he has the impression and the feeling that all that is meaningless. You can explain all that with Kant´s theoretical framework.
Living things in the Critique of Judgment are regarded by humans as if they were purposive, as if every part in them had meaning: The leaves have a purpose, and the roots have another purpose. Even if you were a pure Darwinist, you would project at the beginning on living things the idea of a purpose, for the sake of understanding the organism (And as a second step, you would start trying to discover the explanation from an evolutionist point of view). In such cases, you ask yourself, for example, what role does the leaf play? You will do that even if you were an atheist. Sartre talks about nausea because sometimes living things or life itself is regarded by humans as meaningless, as if the feeling of purposiveness (which in itself can produce a good feeling) had disappeared. Sartre even uses the word contingency when talking about nausea, which is the opposite of the word necessity. The word necessity can always be found in Kant. For Kant, when you experience awe, you have the feeling that that experience cannot be a pure coincidence or contingent.
This means: On the one hand, you have contingency and nausea, and on the other, you have awe, purposiveness, and necessity. The nausea is an existentialist state of mind, but you do not have to read Kant or Sartre to feel that. Children can also feel that, for example, if their parents were suddenly sent to war and had to leave home. And in my thesis, I talk about this, and I put the quote that fits very well. And the professor says in the letter where he reviews my work that in my thesis, I, “nevertheless”, talk about other different authors besides Kant, like Sartre. He says that as if what I wrote about Sartre were completely pointless.
For people who have read the 3rd Critique, the connection will be obvious. Klemme is just being mean. The passage about the nausea is the following: “But suddenly it became impossible for me to think of the existence of the root. It was wiped out, I could repeat in vain, it exists, it is still there, under the bench, against my right foot. It no longer meant anything”.