Joaquim's discussion about Espírito Lusitano has raised a lot of interest among this blog's commentators. It is interesting that Joaquim started out his inquiry into Espírito Lusitano invoking the Portuguese Catholic tradition and that some consensus about it has been reached among several commentators.
Immanuel Kant has often been described as the Philosopher of Protestantism, the equivalent of Aquinas for Catholicism. My point in this post is: how would Kant react to the debate about Espírito Lusitano, what would be his views if he had the opportunity to participate in the debate?
The short answer is that he would consider Espírito Lusitano a fart of the mind. This is an issue that in the critical Kantian terminology belongs to the world of the mind, not to the world of the senses, thus it cannot be the subject of rational discussion.
"Things came to a head a year later, in 1765, when he, now forty-one, read the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). In Heavenly Secrets (8 vol., 1749-56), Swedenborg relates his visions of angels, describing their spiritual world in detail. Kant had been intrigued by the hearsay of the clairvoyant's exploits, but when he read the work, he recognized it as a fraud.
Kant wrote a scathing satire, the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766). He denounces there Swedenborg as the “arch-spirit-seer of all spirit-seers” (2:354.20), whose works are “fantasies” (2:363.36), “wild figments of the imagination” (2:366.11), “eight tomes of nonsense” (2:360.15), and the results of “hypochondrial winds” that result in farts when raging in the guts, and in heavenly visions when raging in the mind (2:348.25-9).
What ticked Kant off was that he saw in the farting mystic a parody of himself (Laywine 1993, 71). The visionary's world of angels is the reductio of dynamic cosmology — the absurd final consequence of Kant's own pantheistic contentions. He had always assumed that reality is radically coherent. Science and metaphysics join hands in its investigation because the cosmos involves an intelligible as well as an empirical side: humans are unqualified parts of nature; mind and body are energetic interacting presences; rationality depends on matter; freedom in nature is just a question of resisting force; and so forth. There is only force, and its product, nature. Kant's ideas had amounted to a dynamic parallelism of the corporeal and the mental — just like Swedenborg's philosophy of heaven.
The Dreams of the Spirit-Seer was thus also self-critique. He wrote Mendelssohn (who was confused by the satire) that to preempt the mockery of others, he found it wisest to mock himself, which was honest and something he had to do because his mind “is really in conflict on this issue” (10:70.2-5). The problem, he explains, is the presence of the mind in the material world, and that analogies between spiritual and material substances are flights of fancy unhindered by data (10:71-2). With this admission, in the letter on April 8, 1766, before his forty-second birthday, the entire pre-critical project Kant had worked on since he was twenty had come to a crashing halt."
(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, here; ch. 8; bold mine).
Immanuel Kant has often been described as the Philosopher of Protestantism, the equivalent of Aquinas for Catholicism. My point in this post is: how would Kant react to the debate about Espírito Lusitano, what would be his views if he had the opportunity to participate in the debate?
The short answer is that he would consider Espírito Lusitano a fart of the mind. This is an issue that in the critical Kantian terminology belongs to the world of the mind, not to the world of the senses, thus it cannot be the subject of rational discussion.
"Things came to a head a year later, in 1765, when he, now forty-one, read the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). In Heavenly Secrets (8 vol., 1749-56), Swedenborg relates his visions of angels, describing their spiritual world in detail. Kant had been intrigued by the hearsay of the clairvoyant's exploits, but when he read the work, he recognized it as a fraud.
Kant wrote a scathing satire, the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766). He denounces there Swedenborg as the “arch-spirit-seer of all spirit-seers” (2:354.20), whose works are “fantasies” (2:363.36), “wild figments of the imagination” (2:366.11), “eight tomes of nonsense” (2:360.15), and the results of “hypochondrial winds” that result in farts when raging in the guts, and in heavenly visions when raging in the mind (2:348.25-9).
What ticked Kant off was that he saw in the farting mystic a parody of himself (Laywine 1993, 71). The visionary's world of angels is the reductio of dynamic cosmology — the absurd final consequence of Kant's own pantheistic contentions. He had always assumed that reality is radically coherent. Science and metaphysics join hands in its investigation because the cosmos involves an intelligible as well as an empirical side: humans are unqualified parts of nature; mind and body are energetic interacting presences; rationality depends on matter; freedom in nature is just a question of resisting force; and so forth. There is only force, and its product, nature. Kant's ideas had amounted to a dynamic parallelism of the corporeal and the mental — just like Swedenborg's philosophy of heaven.
The Dreams of the Spirit-Seer was thus also self-critique. He wrote Mendelssohn (who was confused by the satire) that to preempt the mockery of others, he found it wisest to mock himself, which was honest and something he had to do because his mind “is really in conflict on this issue” (10:70.2-5). The problem, he explains, is the presence of the mind in the material world, and that analogies between spiritual and material substances are flights of fancy unhindered by data (10:71-2). With this admission, in the letter on April 8, 1766, before his forty-second birthday, the entire pre-critical project Kant had worked on since he was twenty had come to a crashing halt."
(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, here; ch. 8; bold mine).
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