Kant Through the Looking Glass

KSO 2014: 322 Kant through the looking glass Ciarán McGlynn, Open University, Milton Keynes I Introduction n his Critical Philosophy, Kant tells us that we can never venture beyond the world of phenomena and investigate Ithe world of noumena. But in the 1760s, in his pre- critical phase, Kant, impressed by reports of the clairvoyant Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), did try to lift the veil of appearance and peer into the forbidden world of things- in-themselves. The fruits of his labours were presented in the singularly odd Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics (1766). What he found contributed to his conviction that neither those who claim communi- cation with spirits, nor speculative metaphysicians, can have any success in leaving the world of empirical phenomena. Swedenborg claimed not only to have peered through the looking glass into a suprasensible reality, but had also written a lengthy interpretation, the Arcana Coelestia (1749- 56), of this transcendent realm. On hearing of Swedenborg’s feats, Kant made extensive enquiries to check the Swede’s claims of spirit-seeing and also acquired and read the eight- volume Arcana Coelestia. What Kant found, however, is that, unlike Alice or Swedenborg, when a metaphysician encounters the looking glass all they are likely to see is a distorted image of the empirical world. In this article, we shall unpack the main elements of Kant’s strange text, including his speculations about the nature of reality beyond the mirror; possible naturalistic explanations for spirit- seeing; why we must be restricted to this side of the mirror; and his rejection of Swedenborg’s account of the spirit- Ciarán McGlynn, Kant through the looking glass, KSO 2014: 322-344. Posted December 15, 2014 www.kantstudiesonline.net © 2014 Ciarán McGlynn & Kant Studies Online Ltd. KSO 2014: 323 realm. We shall then consider what we are to make of Kant’s foray into spirit-seeing, before concluding with an outline of the fourfold significance of Kant’s enigmatic text. While many philosophers have ignored Kant’s injunction against speculative metaphysics, few have tried, as he did, to glimpse behind the mirror of empirical reality guided, as he was, by the claims of a spirit-seer. No other major philosopher, not even William James, has undertaken a speculative metaphysical investigation motivated by a serious consideration of the claims of a clairvoyant. The inability or reluctance of James to incorporate his investigations of psychic events into his philosophy only served to bear out a lesson that philosophers, going back to Kant, have learnt: If a philosopher, qua philosopher, meddles with spiritualism then they are going to get their fingers burnt. However, it was arguably such meddling that contributed to, or even caused, the most significant turn in modern philosophy – Kant’s Copernican Turn in epistemology and metaphysics. Kant’s dabbling in claims of clairvoyance at the very least reinforced his developing view that no true knowledge, metaphysical or otherwise, lies beyond the world of phenomena. The bounds of sense which he established mark the limit to the fruitful pursuit of metaphysics. Any testi- mony of personal experience that claims to reach beyond these bounds must be damned as an unwarranted inquiry into inaccessible regions. Kant did not doubt the existence of such regions; he simply maintained that their contours were permanently beyond our ken. For all we know, Kant tells us in the Critique of Pure Reason (B 309), there may be intelligible entities (transcendent entities) ‘to which our sensible faculty of intuition has no relation whatsoever’. But our categories, as mere forms of thought for our sensible intuition, could not apply to such transcendent entities. Kant’s bitter lesson from his excursion into spirit-seeing, and the shift that it helped to inspire, has influenced the majority of philosophers ever since. It would never even occur to most philosophers to venture into such regions. Ciarán McGlynn, Kant through the looking glass, KSO 2014: 322-344. Posted December 15, 2014 www.kantstudiesonline.net © 2014 Ciarán McGlynn & Kant Studies Online Ltd. KSO 2014: 324 Those few who have followed the would-be evidence of anomalous events have come back with no fruits and have not contributed to the unfolding story of Western philosophy. While Dreams of a Spirit-Seer is written in a style that, in places, borders on frivolity, it seems from his correspondence that Kant took the claims of Swedenborg very seriously.1 The tone of Dreams has made it an enigmatic work. Commentators describe it with terms like ‘strange’, ‘peculiar’, and ‘bizarre’.2 The at times near-flippant tone of the work has encouraged perplexed philosophers to see it as a piece of (middle-aged) juvenilia, written with the sole purpose of lampooning Swedenborg and those gullible enough to believe him.3 On the contrary, I shall argue, not only does Dreams not read like a lampoon, but also that Kant’s correspondence on Swedenborg, and his enquiries into Swedenborg’s feats, together with his efforts of acquir- ing and reading Swedenborg’s magnum opus, all speak of a man who took the exploits of the spirit-seer seriously. II What Kant found through the looking glass n Dreams Kant appears to have several objectives: he ridicules Swedenborg’s writings (but not the accounts of ISwedenborg’s clairvoyant feats); he offers a metaphysical theory about the nature of the spirit-world; he 1 See the letter to Charlotte von Knobloch (August 10, 1763) in Arnulf Zweig (Ed) (1999) Immanuel Kant: Correspondence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 70-76. Zweig, in his introduction to the volume, describes this letter as containing ‘some amusing anecdotes concerning Swedenborg’s alleged feats of clairvoyance’, but notes that Kant is ‘insufficiently skeptical’ about these stories (p.11). 2 See, for instance, the Alison Laywine quotation in John H. Zammito, (2002) Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, p.181 and, ibid, p.194. Also Paul Guyer (ed) (1992) ‘Introduction’ to The Cambridge Companion to Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p.8. 3 Zweig, op Cite, notes that Dreams is ‘significantly different in tone from the letter to Charlotte von Knobloch and that it is written to ‘mock the spiritualist claims that Kant, in his letter, seems to take seriously’. (p.11) Ciarán McGlynn, Kant through the looking glass, KSO 2014: 322-344. Posted December 15, 2014 www.kantstudiesonline.net © 2014 Ciarán McGlynn & Kant Studies Online Ltd. KSO 2014: 325 uncouples morality from the exigencies of post-mortal retribution; and concludes by declaring that we cannot say anything useful about a spirit-world and should restrict our investigations to the sensory-world. He does not say that there is no such thing as a spirit-world; it is just that our inquiries into such a topic are bound to be fruitless. In the Preamble (which, he assures us, promises very little) Kant asks if a philosopher can refute a rational witness who reports an apparition. If the reported apparition is true then this has profound metaphysical implications. We cannot, he claims, disregard all such reports without good reason. With considerations like this in mind he launches into a long investigation into the psychic feats of, and the writings of, Emmanuel Swedenborg. And what are the fruits of this investigation? ‘He found what one usually finds when one has no business searching at all, exactly nothing!’ (2:318)4 In the first chapter of Part One, Kant tries to make sense of the notion of spirit. The idea of spirit is not altogether coherent in terms of our ordinary sensory experience of the world. Spirits, it seems, cannot displace matter, in which case, he concludes, they are not impenetrable (2:321). If spirits were impenetrable then we would be able to have a cubic-foot of spirits. However, if disembodied spirits do not possess the attribute of impenetrability, then this presents a special difficulty. Human souls are supposed to exist in combination with matter to form a whole. However, as the only kind of combination that we know of occurs between material beings, this model of combining cannot cover the union of material with immaterial beings. In truth, we have no adequate conception of a spirit. Spirits, human or otherwise, bear no analogy to the things we know from 4 References to Dreams use the marginal numbers of the standard German edition to Kant’s works. This marginal reference is used in Dreams of a Spirit-seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics, translated and edited by David Walford & Ralf Meerbote (1992) Immanuel Kant: Theoretical Philosophy 1755 – 1770, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 302- 359. Ciarán McGlynn, Kant through the looking glass, KSO 2014: 322-344. Posted December 15, 2014 www.kantstudiesonline.net © 2014 Ciarán McGlynn & Kant Studies Online Ltd. KSO 2014: 326 sensory evidence. The root cause of this problem is that spirits do not fill the space in which they operate. Such a filling of space, Kant maintains, is required for a substance to have extension or shape (2:323-4). Therefore, as spirits do not fill space they cannot have shape. The absence of shape or extension leads to another problem: Where is the human soul located? His own experience tells him that wherever he has consciousness of himself, there he exists: ‘Where I feel, it is there that I am’ (2:324). Certainly no experience makes him believe that he is, in reality, a tiny region of his brain. His experience makes Kant ‘very much inclined’ to believe in immaterial spirits, including his own soul (2:327), although, as he frankly admits, his reasons for holding this view are obscure, even to himself.

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