Chapter V

Prolegomena to Any Future Noumenology

David C. Braun

© 2006 David C. Braun

Chapter V

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[A.  Proof that there is a God:]

The above on being and causation allows further progress.  If the uncreated definite entity need not act to persist or not to become void, then to act is not a necessary, most intimate constitutive part of the entity, by definition. For indicating that entity “has to act not to pass into the void” is a way of indicating how much a part of the entity activity must actually be.  The definite uncreated entity’s truest essence (again, a notion that is definitional) must be either to act or not to act, by excluded middle.  If to act is not a constitutive part of the uncreated definite entity, by excluded middle its truest essence is not to act.  Thus every self-existent entity either is absolutely at rest or must act to be.  An entity not having to act to be, lacking an ontic power to act, cannot thereafter come to have power to act, by causation, unless there is creation of the power as of an entity.  Entity having to act to persist must be entity-as-act, as the being not ontic-act need not act to keep from passing into the void.  Only that act necessary to the activity that is entity is of that entity’s truest essence, and that activity neither merges with another to become one entity-as-act nor halts and resumes nor tolerates contradiction.[1]

Every entity is either on its own or radically created ex nihilo by another.  One who is created by another cannot create another radically because it lacks command of its own being.  Power to create being is power to continue one’s own being so as to be on one’s own.  Such power is proper to that which purely is, for that power is Being purely so.  That which has the property of aseity lacks contradictions and is not under the power of another so afflicted. My own activity suffers contradictions and haltings; I do yet master the phenomenal objects.  Neither the phenomenal nor I can thus be the entity-act.  Nor can I identify myself with that Being which creates ex nihilo, not only for the same reasons but also because power to create implies infinitude of Being.  A creator can create any and all aside from it without diminution or exhaustion of itself and can add to itself if necessary.  Surely I am thus created by a Pure Being of complete, free power, yet also Reason, Whose knowledge of what way to will that willing be not turned against itself comes to Love, and is capable (by being the greatest) of agaph, Which Being thus is, as Love.  Although I find it a mystery to reconcile God’s love with suffering, I would find it impossible to reconcile independent harmony with God’s absence. I must thus speak apophatically of the mystery of God’s love, in which I must believe because it is the Mystery of Faith, as opposed to the false.[2]

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[B.  Alternatives explored:]

                [i.  “Death” of God:]

Suppose, postnoumenologically, God had decided to give me power to continue in existence, after which God decided to die.  But this would allow truth to contradict truth, even in the natural noumenal realm, contrary to the harmony noted.  Moreover, because God is without contradictions (such as evil) and sempiternal, I must supply trust in the continued Divine goodness manifest in continued Divine Being.

[ii.  Without noumenology, in general:]

One who did not accept the noumenological conclusions must reject the God of Christianity; his or her God (if any) would not be so loving as to aid the seeker (as was St. Thomas the Apostle aided) and would not be so overwhelming in rule and majesty as to control events contrary to my will.  Absent noumenology, I could not really state how the world really is, because I would not have established even the certainty of logic.  It might well be that nothing is, that logic is not of the truth (nor is harmony), and that the perceived world and its perceiver are nothing but propositions on a sea of nothingness, able to alter things within the propositionality but otherwise without power, except that perhaps the underlying world can intervene because the real truth could contradict truth.  In such a world, where one cannot know anything for certain save within the propositionality, ethics becomes a matter of conducting (or refraining from the conduct of) affairs within the terms known to be allowable within the propositionality.  Perhaps there would be a God, perhaps not (truth can contradict truth in that world); perhaps one might at least be advised nevertheless to live by the wager of Pascal.  But were there no independent harmony, one would be forced to deny a “harmonic being;” such would be of a providential, loving God.  Absent independent harmony, all harmonies known to me would be necessarily of consciousness.  I could not say whether what lay beyond consciousness were nothing or contradiction.  But would I say that everything would be permitted?  Or would I be bound, in a double sense, not only by my definitionality (whereby alone I alter anything) but that of others (culture, institutions as full social self-expressions) to be in harmony with the full situation?

                [iii.  Arguments for atheism:]

The sole possibly valid argument for atheism depends upon the lack of an effective self-revelation on the part of Being, i.e., failure to manifest an independent harmony so that the mind cannot call it “of the self.”  (Once such is given, one can proceed from existence’s contingency to that needed thereby, the necessity being in no wise on the part of Pure Being, so that the Kantian argument that the cosmological argument is really a disguised form of the ontological argument, based on conversion of “necessary being is perfect being,” is avoided.)  The usual stock arguments against the idea of God can be shown to be disguised forms of the argument of failure or can be averted by discovering the falsehood of the premises or the form of argument therein.  For example, the argument in the Fourth Antinomy rests on the false notion that the prime act of God’s creating is in time.[3]  The argument that the existence of evil is irreconcilable with a good God must be taken on the premise of the idea of God, with all entailed therein, in its harmonicity, which absolutely requires the being of God, needed on the part of existence.  Thus I am left with the need to determine whether a reconciliation can take place, which it seems can occur only in the Mystery of Faith.  The argument that the God of religion Who would allow it to be used by priests for their own possessory interests or for the bourgeois class interest is unworthy of the Name and a contradiction, to the extent it is really another (not the above) argument, is a disguised version of the argument that the God of faith has failed to purify religion and thus failed to make an effective self-revelation.  Here the problem is that any priest so illegitimately using religion is overstepping all fixed lines; the Church can rightfully claim of its adherents’ minds only so much as is needed for faith and morals and of the purse only from one able to give for the support of its necessary work.  The more usual argument, that God is merely a projection of the ideas beyond a point of known perfection to a syncategorematically achieved infinite magnitude, is the denial of the Cartesian argument that my idea of perfection I could not develop my myself but must be God-given.  (That argument, tending to be ontological in character, finds its true home in arguments such as the physico-theological.)  The projection argument is really a disguised form of the argument from failure of Being to make an effective self-revelation.

                [iv.  The alternative in relation to life-values:]

The person without independent harmony could retire to the wilderness to seek personal peace.  While the inner structures are situated in harmony, there is no commitment to, or real profession of, the other as such, only within the (phenomenal) self as so constituted according to the internal system of phenomena.  A coherent answer thereto I would be unable to make in that situation.

                 [v.  Scientism without noumenology and “reality,” or the persistence of tables and chairs:]

            A devotee of “science” might banish all questions of (e.g.) God (or “transcendent being” or “reality”) to the realm of the meaningless or unknowable.  Yet if asked if a world antedated all consciousness thereof, such would unhesitatingly answer in the affirmative.  What if such were to realize that even the question of the existence of tables and chairs when nobody is conscious of them is in the same class as those of God and of the existence of the world before any consciousness? Where might that leave the sciences, besides in the world of Als-ob-Philosophie[4]?  Should not the devotee of pure empiricism without benefit of any noumenology become one who, having abandoned the quest for “truth,” seeks a very good fantasy? If an atheist believes, without evidence, in the persistence of tables and chairs when nobody is conscious of them, whence comes the ontological warrant for that one’s atheism?

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[C.  Defense of noumenology’s arguments thus far (including that there is a God) against a potential allegation based on religion:]

Heresy-hunters will please note the following quote from a dessicated, preconciliar theological manual:

Concl. — Merito igitur rejicienda est methodus immanentiae, qualem eam exposuimus, scilicet ut quae ex se sola plane sufficiens est imo ex exclusive adhibenda, prae apologetica traditionali, ad probandum factum revelationis necnon ad inveniendam rerum religionem catholicam. Si autem ita restringitur haec methodus, ut nullatenus proponatur substituenda apologeticae traditionali, neque ex ea sola sufficiens et completa, sed tantummodo ut praeparatio subjectiva et moralis ad methodum traditionalem, respectu eorum qui praejudiciis kantianis imbuti sunt, nec inutilis esse neque respuenda. Isti enim, examine reflexo propriae actionis et vitae, intelligunt hominem sibi non sufficere, sed indigere aliquo auxilio extrinseco ut possit vitam moralem plenam agere, et sic opportum praeparantur et disponuntur veritatem, ad eam argumenta externa, philosophica nempe et historica. Item, dummodo vitetur excessus, in principiis statuendis, videlicet: 1) dummodo neque rejiciatur neque nimis deprimatur valor rationes theoreticae, sed servetur primatus intellectus; 2) dummodo non inefficax declaretur methodus traditionalis, remoto methodo immanentiae, sed e contra agnoscatur argumenta externa-extrinseca ceteris praestare; 3) dummodo explicite observetur exigentiam ad supernale, ex qua argumentum sumitur, nullatenus repleti ex ipsius naturae principiis, sed ex solo instinctu Spiritus Sancti, hominem ad finem suum actualem invitantis, — haec methodus, non ex se sola quidem, sed in sua connexione cum argumentis externis, potest, etiam ipsis fidelibus, aliquod praebere complementum apologeticae traditionali.[5]

I note that, instead of composing the methodus immanentiae by the mere examining of life and finding a need to be fulfilled by the Spirit, in order to lead me to consider the argument of the externals, noumenology seeks against “Kantian prejudices” to erect a defense of the realist’s world and of the being of God, at least by showing the ground of the independent harmony that can alone be grounded, immediately in a transcendent real, ultimately in Being, in Whom alone is right truly right, just as alone in the independent harmony can I find the way to apply the categories of thought transcendently to arrive at the argument for the being of God, thence to the truth of divine Revelation. This must I do to avoid claims of meaninglessness or nothingness against this system of philosophy.

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[D.  Re-examination of what is certain in light of the argument:]

                [i.  The directly given as incorrigible:]

A pure Kantian may argue that the noumenology’s argument for the transcendence of harmony and, one suspects, the reality of God (contingent on showing that there is a certain kind of activity, just as the former depends on showing its independence of subjectivity) is really empirical and thus not really certain. But I distinguish (as Kant did not) empirical inferences (subject to uncertainty) from direct percepta; the latter I otherwise call definitions and hold to be incorrigible. Direct percepta, or definitions, combined with a priori demonstrations of the impossibility of other dispositions,[6] make a case certain.

                 [ii.  Whether only a purely analytic judgment is a priori valid; the question of retrospective identity:]

The analytic philosopher, following Hume, holds only analytic propositions a priori valid.  But the purely analytic judgment is based on pure identity, i.e., that for all the period of the givenness of A, A is A and not not-A, everything being either A or not-A.  Beyond the period of givenness of A, I have no ground for the bald assumption of an antecedent identity or harmony, except within the system (prenoumenologically), which contains in the present memory the recapitulation of prior waking harmonic moments in life to produce the unity of system within the percipient person.  Only upon my finding a harmony independent of the internal system of harmony can I extend the harmony to the nonperceived yet real, as that harmony must be the not-void.  This allows further extension into the past of the harmonic rule and of the identity, now (in a real sense) no longer analytically, yet not particularly or contingently any further, for the truths now learnable are necessary and universal and thus a priori.  If this is not followed, then none has any ground for favoring the priority of waking consciousness.  Over and against such as Carnap, who held such statements as “the totality of the perceived world is real” to be meaningless because devoid of consequence to be tested or used, I note the use of noumenology in securing the worth of the personal psyche and the world’s order as truthfully given, and on it and the postnoumenological establishment of the reality of God I find the reality of the world and other persons, validating the “human sciences” and legal concepts (liberty, rights, duties).

                [iii.  Time as related to knowledge, not to ontic constitution:]

Time is not an ontic structure; it must be either an essential or a purely noetic structure.  The traditional position of critical philosophy is the latter; for Kant (e.g.), time is but the pure form of internal intuition.  But if time is at all ordinal, especially related to causation, and if the latter has any purely objective basis, time cannot be a merely noetic structure.  But if perception of time is affected by the condition of my consciousness, time perception must be noetic.  But if A=A, implying that A is identical in all its moments, is more than the pure “A=A at one moment,” would A not have a temporal moment in it even ontically?  Or is the problem purely of “my knowing A” in this instance?  The synthesis (if any) according to harmony is in my knowing A, a synthetic knowledge and not necessarily a synthetic ontic constitution in time of it.

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[E.  Personal freedom:]

                [i.  The argument for it:]

Belief in personal freedom as part of the system of belief unto the plunge taken to engage the signatory experience does not lead to loss of noumenology if freedom be false. If the mind be unfree, subject to causal determination (e.g., from without), noninternal (e.g., physical) control seems assured. The mind’s purposes are better served by intellectual, not nonintellectual or physical, control; if choice is intended to be governed rationally, unfreedom is not an appropriate strategy for achieving such government. Concealing sensing mind’s unfreedom would, moreover, be deceptive. As I so strive, moreover, to that extent I take my freedom, a freedom the unfree cannot capture.

                [ii.  Of the argument against it; the problem with “Ockham’s razor” as used therein:]

Over and against the claim of freedom is arrayed sometimes a panoply of arguments founded on results of neurological experiment and pasted together with the glue of “Ockham’s razor” (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem) to outlaw the concept of a free soul. Invocation of Ockham’s razor invites concern; “necessity” is often misused in arguments using it to refer, not to the actual need to answer data given and what is otherwise actually known, but to a theorized kind one persuades oneself to accept. The original arguments behind its formulation, the economy of the divine creation and the greatest efficiency of production from each agent cause, and the principle of its use that all the needs on the parts of the effect(s) be fully known, point either to the most universal possible transcendent use (merely to state these as laws for going from a given effect to settle the question of causation) or to merely phenomenal use (and thus not, e.g., to the question of the existence of human freedom, given the proposition that stimulation of the brain can account for internal states of consciousness and that a surgical lesion in the brain can result in a “split” of voluntary motor activities).

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[F.  Remaining concerns from Kant’s first Critique:]

                [i.  The Antinomies of Pure Reason and their solution:]

To solve the Antinomies of Pure Reason I object:  (1) That arguments for extension in infinitum[7]  misconceive the nature of extension (and the need therefor), and add a mistaken use of infinite regress as if it were a real, not a syncategorematic, possibility; (2) That the material to be divided or broken into the components precedes spatiality and extension (I hereby circumvent the argument that each space consists of spaces and that a part of the manifold must necessarily consist of parts side by side, thus compound and each part a substance),[8] and that infinite division is here also a sin against the syncategorematic infinity that is for mathematical labors alone; (3) That the will has a kind of creativity and may select from its predilections presented, these being in its character as resources, so that nothing is created ex nihilo by a limited will, and that the notion of deterministic causation[9] is one-sided and inapplicable to the free agent; (4) That the argument against God misconstrues the creative act, although God’s, as being in time, with a beginning.[10]  (I know this to be in error as to God, and no thing limited exists for the perception of time, so I deny that God is the highest member in the worldly series in time).  Kant’s weak attempt to reconstruct a possible freedom in the transcendental unity of the self for moral purposes[11] is necessary only if one accepts his conclusion that the internal sense’s choice as phenomenon is subject to absolute causal determination, but in view of the true solution to the Antinomy, I can discard it as insufficient or develop it in light of the truth.  All this depends on the transcendent harmonic logic, as is quite clear once Kant’s groundwork is taken as given.

                [ii.  Kant’s objections to the apagogic method and to private evidence answered:]

Kant disallowed use of the apagogical method of proof of nonmathematical, nonempirical synthetic propositions about the transcendent.  He argued that the refutation could result either from the mere representation of conflict of the opening opinion with the subjective conditions under which alone reason could comprehend it or from transcendental illusion’s deception.  He would allow it only where it was impossible to foist our representations’ subjective element into the place of the objective.[12]  But I have arrived at positive term harmony not of my subjectivity, which requires that I be able now to frame an apophatic concept of transcendent being.  Kant held also that one cannot hold to be true (as conforming to an object) and thus a conviction what one has as valid subjectively unless the thing be based solely on a public matter, in the absence of which one has merely persuasion, which again represents the internal illusion based on the conditions of thought, etc.[13]  Kant apparently did not prove the existence of other minds or a public, though he argued, for the reality of external objects and against idealism, that change in representations can be gauged only against a permanence that does not obtain even for my consciousness of myself.[14]  But had he really proved the need for an absolute permanence as one might find with independent harmony?  Or had Kant really found only the need for a more permanent against which a less permanent must be taken? But for his insistence on (a merely assumed) public science to hold good at all I must establish the independence of harmony from myself.  Railing against the privacy of experience is a detriment to the certainty of my reasonings, as also to the very possibility of knowledge of the true, as no public can at all be assumed until the independence of harmony is shown.  At any rate, moreover, many hereof have external analogs for corroboration.

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[1] If there were no ontic-act, no entity would be of its own active were there no creation, and as entity-act has in it no activity not the entity-act, were there no creativity there could not possibly be any “composed activity.”

[2] I do not refer to Pure Being as in itself necessary, for the necessity is actually on the part of the being which cannot cause itself.  This is not dependent on the ontological proof. Contrast Kant, op. cit., Transcendental Dialectic, bk. II, ch. III, B: 636f/A: 608f.  The true demonstration of God’s Being as the radical Cause of nonvoid reality avoids the need to argue against an infinite causal series.  I add that the argument’s reliance on the “entity-as-activity” does not violate the rule that being is not a predicate, a rule needing at any rate an adjustment, as the “not-nothing” is a reflexive predicate pertaining alone to being-as-subject.  “If an entity does not have to act in order not to pass into the void absolutely” will suffice.  But I do not thereby contravene the harmony; my lead merely suggests how intimately activity must be intertwined with the being-subject in the argument.  That such an entity must, then, be an ontic-act follows from the argument and exhibits a being-subject that is as truly (albeit reflexively) a being predicated of that subject.  Lest one object that the notion of the causa sui violates the rule that being is not an essence or predicate, I add that that rule is but a rule of argument, viz., that one may not infer from its essence that fact of a thing’s existence, and that (given that the abstractible is in principle not of the entity whereon inquiry focuses) if activity’s inherence in the entity is such that it must act so as not to pass into the void and must mean that the purely inhering activity can be none other than that act described as se causare, the objection hardly seems apt.  Only the action through which the thing persists inheres in the entity, so that if it cease to act it passes into the void. I do not so pass though I cease to act and my activity does not so inhere, which it must were I an originary entity but need not do if I am radically created by another.  And my activity is not the entity-as-act, which is the only act that must persist if the entity is not to pass to the void.

[3]Id., ch. II, section II, B: 482; 483/A: 454; 455. See the First Antinomy, which appears to deal with the problem of empty time before the beginning, though such time does not exist. B: 455/A: 427. The sequentiality it seeks can be dissociated from temporal succession, which is in the finite mind.

[4] I intend, in this remark, to raise the specter of the pragmatic or useful fiction as being precisely where any concept used in science must be left absent the independent harmony that undergirds noumenology. However, as I have already stressed elsewhere (§19, supra), pragmatism is not without its problems even without noumenology, and is untenable given it.

[5] J. M. Hervé, Manuale Theologiae Dogmaticae (18. ed., Parisiis 1935), I, §112(d), pp. 102f.  I propose the following translation:  “Concl.  Rightly, then, should we reject the method of immanence, such as we have shown it, i.e., as of itself alone sufficient and alone to be offered in lieu of the traditional apologetic, to show the fact of revelation and even to discover the truths of the Catholic religion.  But if we restrict this method so as not at all to substitute it for traditional apologetics, if we hold it to be neither sufficient of itself nor complete but only as a subjective and moral preparation for traditional apologetics (having in mind those full of Kantian prejudices), this method cannot be entirely useless or rejectable.  These people, reflecting on their actions and moral lives, understand man not to be self-sufficient but to need some extrinsic help that he may lead a full moral life; thus they may appropriately be prepared for and disposed toward the truth, to receive philosophic and also historic arguments toward that end.  Thus, while we should avoid excess, we set forth the following guidelines:  1) as long as in so doing we do not reject or excessively depreciate the force of theological reasonings but guard the primacy of the intellect; 2) as long as we do not declare ineffective the traditional methods without regard to the method from immanence, but recognize that the traditional methods from externals have primacy over that of immanence; 3) as long as we explicitly observe that the need drawing man to the supernal is satisfied not from principles from his own nature but by the sole instigation of the Holy Spirit — this method, not of itself alone, but in connection with external arguments can provide even the faithful a complement for the traditional apologetics.”

[6] Compare the legal evidentiary rule that, where a criminal case is to be proved by circumstantial evidence, the evidence must, to constitute proof beyond a reasonable doubt, exclude every reasonable hypothesis other than that of the defendant’s guilt of the crime charged. E.g., McArthur v. State, 351 So.2d 972 (Fla. 1977).

[7] Kant, op. cit., B:  455, 457/A:  427, 429.

[8] Id., B: 463/A: 435.

[9] Id., B: 473, 475/A: 445, 447.

[10] Id., B: 483/A: 455.

[11] Id., section IX, III.

[12] Id., Method of Transcendentalism, ch. I, section IV, B: 819f/A: 791f; see also this work, ch. II, §12.

[13] Kant, op. cit., ch. II, section III, especially at B: 849/A: 821.

[14] Id., Elements of Transcendentalism, Transcendental Analytic, first div., bk. II, ch. II, B: 275ff.; see also Preface to Second Edition, B: xxxix-xl, fn.