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ARTICLE

KANT’S THESES ON EXISTENCE*

Uygar Abaci

Kant’s alleged refutation of the ontological proof for the existence of Godhas long been and still is being discussed by philosophers from varioustraditions with various motives. One major circle of debate, especially afterthe flourishing of philosophy of language in the first half of the twentiethcentury, has turned around Kant’s celebrated dictum concerning thepredicative nature of the concept of existence, i.e. that it is not a realpredicate or a determination of a thing, which appears as the basis of Kant’smain objection to the ontological proof. Although some proponents of theontological proof have raised serious doubts as to whether Kant’s dictum isat all relevant to or really refutes the ontological proof, the significance ofthis negative thesis for Kant’s particular refutation has been widelyacknowledged, and the thesis itself has been extensively scrutinized.However, its integrity with Kant’s critical understanding of existence andmodality has not received considerable attention. Two aspects needattention: first, it is a general statement on the use of the concept ofexistence and its significance goes far beyond the refutation of a certain formof proof for the existence of God; second, it is a negative statement, and themeaning of this negation cannot be properly grasped in isolation fromKant’s other, positive theses about what existence is. What I hope myattempt here to be is a limited contribution to this task, a comprehensiveform of which will exceed the bounds of this paper. Therefore, the readershould be aware in advance that this is not a paper essentially on theontological proof, nor on the alleged refutation of it by Kant. It has nointention nor claim to take a side in the age-old debate, make originalreconstructions of the proof or the refutation, and produce a conclusion, ashas been done innumerable times. Despite the obvious fact that as theauthor of this paper I have my own humble position, the reconstructions Iwill suggest both of the proof and the refutation are not specifically designedto defend a certain proponent or opponent position, but to lay out the textual

*This is a developed version of the paper, ‘A Categorical difference in Kant: Reality and Modes

of Being’, which I presented at Bilkent University Kant Symposium in April 2005. I would like

to thank Stephen Voss, Ilhan Inan and Barry Stocker for their very helpful comments on the

earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the anonymous referee who provided me

with valuable feedback in revising the paper.

British Journal for the History of Philosophy 16(3) 2008: 559–593

British Journal for the History of PhilosophyISSN 0960-8788 print/ISSN 1469-3526 online ª 2008 BSHP

http://www.informaworld.com DOI: 10.1080/09608780802200729

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context and development of Kant’s negative thesis concerning existence inorder to propose a holistic account of Kant’s notion of existence.

For that purpose, I will make a detailed review of Kant’s refutation andshow that the distinction Kant proposes between real and logical predicatesin support of his thesis that ‘existence is not a real predicate or adetermination of a thing’ is the final step of a threefold exposition ofconfusions with respect to the predicative usages of modal concepts. I willargue that Kant’s key aim throughout this threefold effort is to forbid theintroduction of modal categories into the concepts of things as predicatesand thereby classify all modal categories as non-real predicates regardless oftheir propositional context. In the second part of the paper, I will gothrough Kant’s theses on existence one by one with a view to understandingtheir interrelation, if any. I will first argue that the gist of the originalnegative thesis, as suggested by the claim that modalities are categoricallynon-real predicates, lies in the categorial distinction between reality, as acategory of quality, and existence, as a category of modality. Then, I willsuggest that two different but related positive theses about what existence ismay be found in Kant’s main texts. The first one, which is in fact explicitlystated together with the original thesis as its positive counterpart, is that‘existence is absolute positing’; the second one, which can be extracted fromthe postulates of empirical thought in the Critique of Pure Reason, is that ‘toexist is to be connected, either immediately or analogically, with an actualperception’. Finally, relying on the account I will propose of thesetwo positive theses, I will offer an explanation for Kant’s claim thatexistential propositions are synthetic, which has long been challenged bymany philosophers as contradicting the negative thesis. This will also help usto see to what extent the refutation itself may be considered as consistentwith the critical features of Kant’s philosophy.

Kant pursues his thesis that existence is not a real predicate mostextensively in two places. The first one is a precritical essay with the title TheOne Possible Basis for a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763), andthe other one is ‘On the impossibility of an ontological proof of God’sexistence’, a section in the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of PureReason (1781).1 Even this bare contextual background of the thesis should

1Unless otherwise stated, all references to these two works of Kant will be to the following

English translations: Immanuel Kant, The One Possible Basis for a Demonstration of the

Existence of God¼Der einzig mogliche Beweisgrund (hereafter The One Possible Basis), English

and German, translated by Gordon Treash (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska

Press, 1979); Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (hereafter Critique), translated and edited

by P. Guyer and A. W. Wood (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

As is standard, references to the Critique are to the pages of the first (A) and second (B) edition.

Kant also presents an almost full repetition of his account of the refutation and the thesis in the

Critique in his ‘Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion’ (1783–1784), edited within

Religion and Rational Theology, translated and edited by A. W. Wood and G. Di Giovanni

(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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already indicate an ontotheological approach that takes the question ofexistence in general together with, or even as a part of, the question of theexistence of God.2 In both places, Kant’s primary intention is to refute thetraditional Cartesian form of the ontological proof which can be traced backto as early as Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) and can also beencountered, though with various modifications, in Kant’s more immediatepredecessors such as Leibniz.3 According to Kant’s own reconstruction of it,its basic argumentative character is to infer God’s existence from Hisessence, that is, from the mere concept of God, to which existence ispresupposed to belong as a predicate. Kant’s objection in this predominantform of the ontological proof is to the introduction of existence into theconcept of God, and he formulates his thesis in order to justify thisfundamental objection. For the immediate implication of the claim thatexistence is not a real predicate is that existence cannot be included as apredicate in the concept not only of a supposedly exceptional being such asGod but of anything whatsoever.4 This suggests that the negative thesisabout existence is something more radical than the backbone of a refutation

2Kant briefly repeats his views on existence in some of his other post-Critique lectures as well.

See, for example, the ‘Ontology’ sections of Metaphysik Mrongovius (1782–1783) and

Metaphysik L2 (1790–1791?) in Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Metaphysics, translated and

edited by K. Ameriks and S. Naragon (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,

1997). Hereafter, references to Religion and Rational Theology and Lectures on Metaphysics will

be, as provided by the Cambridge edition, to the Academy edition, Kant’s gesammelte Schriften,

Vols 28 and 29 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1900–). In Lectures on Metaphysics too Kant

tends to make his entry into the issue of existence with reference to the existence of God: ‘This

concept, although it is simple, is still quite difficult, because we apply it to concepts which are

sublime beyond all experience and example. E.g., to the concept of God’ (28: 554).3At the end of his refutation in the Critique, Kant explicitly states that what he demonstrated to

be ‘only so much trouble and labor lost’ is the Cartesian version of the ontological argument.

There he also mentions Leibniz’s name as another representative of the ontological argument

that failed to prove a priori the possibility of God (Critique, A602/B630). We can conclude that

although Kant has in mind Descartes’s version as the general axis of the argument to assault, he

also considers Leibniz’s claim to complete the former with a modal modification. On the other

hand, nowhere in his whole corpus of works does Kant mention Anselm’s original argument.

Some writers claim that he knew nothing of the latter. See, for instance, Chapter 10 of Charles

Hartshorne, Anselm’s Discovery: A Re-Examination of the Ontological Proof for God’s Existence

(La Salle: Open Court, 1965). For Descartes’s argument, Chapter 5 of Rene Descartes,

Meditations on First Philosophy in Selected Philosophical Writings, translated by John

Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1988); for an extensive discussion of Leibniz’s enduring efforts to develop a modal version of the

ontological argument, see also Chapters 4 and 8 of Robert Merrihew Adams, Leibniz:

Determinist, Theist, Idealist (hereafter Leibniz: DTI) (New York and Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1998). For Anselm’s version, see Anselm, Proslogion in The Many-faced Argument, edited

by J. H. Hick and A. C. McGill (New York: Macmillan, 1967) 4–6.4In The One Possible Basis, and also with minor differences in some of his other precritical

works such as Nova Dilucidatio (1755) and Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Kant offers an

alternative ontological proof that does not rely on the containment of existence as a predicate in

the concept of God and its being a real predicate. For the English translations of Nova

Dilucidatio and Inaugural Dissertation, see Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770.

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of an ontological proof; as I hope to show in the following pages, there is awhole programme of modality behind Kant’s refutation and thesis. In thispaper, I will mainly stick to the version of the refutation in the Critique,which is more developed than that in The One Possible Basis, but I will attimes also make use of the latter, where the thesis itself is presented moreexplicitly and straightforwardly than it is in the former.

1. CONFUSIONS AND DISTINCTIONS

Kant’s overall strategy in ‘On the Impossibility of an Ontological Proof ofGod’s Existence’ is to exhibit step by step the confusions that lead to falseassumptions in the ontological argument and to introduce clear distinctionsconcerning the confused issues. Although they can be seen and discussed asdifferent arguments operating separately, I observe a studied unity amongthem such that all of these alleged confusions are about the use of the modalcategories of necessity, possibility and existence, and the correspondingdistinctions are complementary parts of a general programme of modality,which forbids the introduction of modal categories into the concepts ofthings. Each of the following three sections will discuss one of the steps inthis threefold effort, the final one of which will be set forth as the basis of thethesis that existence is not a real predicate.

1.1 Unconditioned Necessity of Judgements versus Conditioned

Necessity of Things

One interpretation of the ontological proof, in either its Anselmian orCartesian form, is that what it aims to prove is not only the simple existencebut the necessary existence of God. There are a significant number ofmodern-day proponents of this so-called modal version of the proof suchas Charles Hartshorne, Norman Malcolm, Alvin Plantinga and Lenn

Briefly, Kant argues that for there to be any possibility, its content or what is thought in it must

be previously given by something that actually exists, either in it as a determination of it or

through it as a consequence (see The One Possible Basis, 83). Therefore, there must be an

absolutely necessary being that grounds not only the existence but even the thought or

possibility of things in general. In his categorical denial of the possibility of a theoretical proof

of the existence of God, Kant tacitly dismisses his own precritical proof together with all the

traditional ones. I think the shift in Kant’s understanding of modality in the critical period

justifies this categorical denial to some extent (see also n18); but as his own proof’s line of

inference is radically different from the other traditional proofs that he claims to refute and his

objections to the latter do not in the least apply to the former, it is still curious that he never

designs a separate refutation for his own proof. For an extensive discussion of what might be a

justification for Kant’s rejection of his own proof, see Mark Fisher and Eric Watkins, ‘Kant on

the Material Ground of Possibility: From The Only Possible Argument to the Critique of Pure

Reason’, The Review of Metaphysics, 52 (1998) No. 2: 369–95.

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Goodman.5 It is noteworthy that Kant begins his refutation in the Critiqueby discussing the emptiness of what he calls the verbal or nominal definitionof God: ‘something whose non-being is impossible’.6 It is by no means clearfrom Kant’s own words, however, whether he is targeting there a particularmodalized version of the ontological proof, or whether he simply thinks it isa good idea to start with a modal critique of the ideal of pure reason, i.e. ensrealissimum, which, he had argued in the previous section,7 is the onlyconcept compatible with the age-old popular notion of God as an absolutelynecessary being. One thing that is certainly clear is that Kant thinks thatthere is something confused in the very concept of absolutely necessaryexistence and this confusion has to be done away with before there is anysubstantial attack on the classical, non-modal form of the proof itself. First,as a radical challenge to the alleged unthinkability of the non-existence ofthat absolutely necessary being, Kant asks whether we really think anythingat all in the concept of such an absolutely necessary being. His answer is infact quite obvious in the introductory paragraph, which reminds us that theconcept in question is the ideal of pure reason, ‘a mere idea’ whoselegitimate function is to set boundaries to the faculty of thought, theunderstanding, rather than providing it with new objects. However, he isalso well cognizant of the instances to which absolute necessity ismeaningfully applied, namely analytic judgements. Kant points out thatall examples of absolute necessity are bound to be taken only from

5See Charles Hartshorne, Anselm’s Discovery: A Re-Examination of the Ontological Proof for

God’s Existence and again his ‘Is the Denial of Existence Ever Contradictory’, The Journal of

Philosophy, 63 (17 February 1966) No. 4: 85–93; Norman Malcolm, ‘Anselm’s Ontological

Arguments’, The Philosophical Review, 69 (January 1960) No. 1: 41–62; Alvin Plantinga,

‘Kant’s Objection to the Ontological Argument’, The Journal of Philosophy, 63 (October 1996)

No. 19: 537–46; Lenn E. Goodman, God of Abraham (New York: Oxford University Press,

1996).6See Critique, A593/B621.7The refutation of the ontological proof in the Critique is the fourth section of a chapter called

‘The Ideal of Pure Reason’, which is one of the most important parts of the whole Critique and

a very difficult one to interpret. In the previous three sections, Kant explains how the idea of

God as an ens realissimum, an individual being that contains the sum total of all possible

predicates of things, is generated by pure reason as a necessary consequence of one of its natural

procedures, and is then speculatively matched with the idea of an absolutely necessary being.

The difficulty of interpretation arises from the dubiousness of the mentioned part, which allows

different ways of reading, namely as a critique of a natural tendency of pure reason itself, as a

critique of traditional speculative theologies in general and as a critique of a particular, i.e.

Leibniz’s, notion of God. I believe that all three readings can be accepted simultaneously. For

reasons of economy, I would like only to point out here that the most significant

accomplishment of this chapter, which also includes the refutations of the cosmological and

what Kant calls the physico-theological proofs, is reformulating God as a transcendental

presupposition necessary for the function of the faculty of understanding; and yet being a mere

ideal of pure reason, God is, strictly speaking, not an object of possible experience and His

existence cannot be proved whatever theoretical means is used. This is a major step in the whole

critical project to secularize the concept of God and to relocate it in the practical domain as a

regulative principle, away from the need for any ontological argument for His existence.

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judgements, but not from things themselves, and thereby he makes his initialdistinction: ‘The unconditioned necessity of judgments . . . is not an absolutenecessity of things; for the absolute necessity of the judgement is only aconditioned necessity of the thing, or of the predicate in the judgment’.8 Forinstance, in the typical analytic proposition, ‘A triangle has three angles’, thenecessity of the existence of three angles is conditioned on the existence of atriangle; that is to say, neither the existence of the object of the subjectconcept, nor the existence of the object of the predicate-subject is un-conditionally necessary, but only on the condition that the former is given asexisting, the existence of the latter becomes necessary. If the former isretained, cancelling the latter leads to a logical contradiction, for the latterbelongs to the conceptual content of the former. However, as Kant states, ‘ifI cancel the subject together with the predicate, then no contradiction arises;for there is no longer anything that could be contradicted’.9 In the samefashion, the proposition ‘God is omnipotent’ is absolutely necessaryindependently of the objective reality10 of the concept of God, that is,whether or not the concept of God is applicable to a possible object ofexperience. Omnipotence is a predicate that necessarily belongs to theconcept of God, but this says no more than that only on condition that athing referred to by the concept of God actually exists, must it necessarily beomnipotent. Once the existence of the thing itself is denied, there will be nonecessity of omnipotence left. In other words, the proposition ‘God isomnipotent’ reads as the conditional statement ‘If God exists, He isomnipotent’, whose antecedent can be denied without having to deny theabsolute necessity of the proposition as a whole. We therefore come to thefirst conclusion of Kant’s refutation of the ontological argument: that

8My emphases, Critique, A594/B622.9Critique, A595/B623.10In Kant’s language, the broader sense of the term ‘objective reality’ (objekive Realitat) refers

to the applicability of a concept to an object of intuition in general, either empirical or pure.

This sense of the term captures Kant’s precritical notion of the real element of possibility which

denotes, without an empirical modal commitment, the data or material that is represented

through a logically possible concept (see also n18). However, since Kant’s intention in using the

term here, as will be seen in the next section, is to underline the distinction between the ‘logical

possibility of concepts’ that can be tested through mere concepts and the ‘real possibility of

things’ that can be tested only with an appeal to the ‘principles of possible experience’, my

impression is that in the present context ‘objective reality’ has a somewhat more empirical

emphasis and refers to a concept’s applicability to possible objects of empirical experience.

Heidegger and Hanna prefer to use even stronger language in their definitions; the former

identifies objective reality simply with actuality or existence, the latter takes it to be the

‘reference or applicability’ of a representation to ‘actual, real, or existing objects’. See

Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology (hereafter Basic Problems), translated by Albert

Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982) 34; and Robert Hanna, Kant and the

Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001) 84. Nevertheless, I believe

that the sense of objective reality I suggest above serves better to keep the spirit of the

distinction between ‘possibility’ and ‘actuality’ of objects to which Kant refers in the Postulates.

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the absolute necessity of a judgement does not entail the absolutely necessaryexistence of the object of the subject concept of that very judgement.

However, this conclusion evokes serious controversies when Kant claimsthat it also holds true of the concept of an absolutely necessary being. Whenthe proposition ‘God is an absolutely necessary being’ that is drawn fromthe nominal definition of God is treated in the same way as the previousexamples of absolutely necessary propositions and is turned into aconditional, what we have would be the problematic proposition ‘If Godexists then He necessarily exists’. Malcolm thinks that the opponents of theontological argument including Kant who rely on this conditional are in aself-contradictory position, because the possibility of God’s non-existencethat is entailed by the antecedent clause is incompatible with theimpossibility of God’s non-existence that is entailed by the consequentclause, and one cannot accept both sides simultaneously!11 AlthoughMalcolm is justified here in pointing out the implications of an apparentlycareless claim of Kant, I think his criticism fails to grasp Kant’s main pointin his whole refutation. First, it is quite significant that the analyticpropositions through which the subject is ascribed predicates such as havingthree angles or omnipotence do not lead to the problem that the ascriptionof a modality such as necessary existence leads. This confirms that theessential claim Kant wants to make in his refutation is that modal categoriescannot in any way be contained analytically in the concepts of things andthus cannot be introduced a priori into the definition of anythingwhatsoever. Malcolm is clearly mistaken when he charges Kant formaintaining a ‘parallel’ or ‘symmetry’ between the propositions ‘A trianglehas three angles’ and ‘God has necessary existence’. For the reason I statedabove, Kant’s real intention is to attract attention to the asymmetry betweennecessary or analytic propositions that have non-modal predicates and theallegedly analytic modal propositions, which he will later declare to becategorically contingent and synthetic. Moreover and more importantly, asKant’s particular distinction concerning the use of the modality of necessitysuggests, the proposition ‘God has necessary existence’ is not evenpermissible in the first place, not to mention its conditional form; for sucha proposition would be a misapplication of the concept of unconditionednecessity to things themselves rather than to judgements.12 Then, whenKant says that the possibility of rejecting the subject with all its predicateswithout committing any contradiction also holds true of the concept of an

11See Norman Malcolm, ‘Anselm’s Ontological Arguments’, 58. For Kant’s claim which forms

the basis of Malcolm’s objection, see Critique A595/B623.12Malcolm suggests that Kant’s real view cannot be that ‘necessity is properly predicated only of

propositions (judgments) not of things’. As for his ground of objection, he refers to Kant’s

discussion of ‘The Postulates of Empirical Thought in General’, where Kant establishes the

criterion of necessary existence. See Malcolm’s n33, in ‘Anselm’s Ontological Arguments’. I will

try to show how inaccurate Malcolm’s understanding of the postulate of necessity is in the final

section.

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absolutely necessary being, he probably aims to emphasize that no subject isexempt from the possibility of rejection, as he acknowledges that that theproponents of the ontological argument rely on the alleged privilege of thenotion of God as an absolutely necessary being.

Therefore, in the first step of his overall argument, in addition to hisgeneral objection to the introduction of modal categories into the conceptsof things, Kant makes his particular point about necessary existence andrules out its unconditioned ascription as a predicate to the subject of ajudgement. Some proponents of the modal version of the ontological proofmay still insist on the idea that James Van Cleve formulates: even if simpleexistence is not a real, determining predicate, necessary existence may beone, and thus Kant’s refutation may be ‘circumvented’.13 I believe that thisidea’s clash with Kant’s notion of real predicates will become clearer whenwe come to investigate Kant’s third distinction in the refutation, which isbetween real and merely logical predicates, and the full meaning of hisrelated thesis that existence is not a real predicate. I dare to say that Kant’sabove step alone makes it impossible to classify necessary existence even as amerely logical predicate (of things) at all, let alone a real, determining one inKant’s sense.

1.2 Logical Possibility of Concepts versus Real Possibility of Things

Having claimed not only that necessary existence cannot be introduced intothe concept of a thing but also that it cannot be ascribed to thingsthemselves unconditionally, Kant goes on to consider the simple, non-modalform of the ontological argument and questions its claim to the existence ofGod as an ens realissimum (most real being), this time, with respect to itsvery possibility:14

It has, you say, all reality, and you are justified in assuming such a being aspossible (to which I have consented up to this point, even though a non-

contradictory concept falls far short of proving the possibility of its object).

13James Van Cleve, Problems from Kant, (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1999) 192.14For Kant, the ens realissimum notion of God and the nominal definition of God as that whose

non-being is impossible are generated by two distinct procedures of pure reason, the former

being the consequence of pure reason’s drive for the complete or thoroughgoing determination of

things, the latter being the consequence of the drive to reach the unconditioned in the series of

conditions. Kant humourously narrates the story of the speculative match that pure reason

makes between these two originally distinct notions: ‘First it convinces itself of the existence of

some necessary being. In this it recognizes an unconditioned existence. Now it seeks for the

concept of something independent of all conditions, and finds it . . . in that which contains all

reality’ (ibid., A587/B615). However, although he thinks that the notion of an absolutely

necessary being is fundamentally confused, he holds the view that the notion of a most real

being, as will be seen, is logically possible.

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Now existence is also comprehended under all reality: thus existence lies in theconcept of something possible. If this thing is cancelled, then the internalpossibility of the thing is cancelled, which is contradictory.15

This is a preliminary passage through which Kant presents his own verycompact reconstruction of the ontological argument and prepares the readerto follow his essential attack on it. Kant’s reconstruction can be analysed inrelation to two important points that he wants to emphasize.

(i) The first point draws attention to the assumption of the argument thatthe ens realissimum as an individual object is possible. Kant says inparentheses that he had hitherto allowed the assumption, but he also makesit clear that what is thought to justify this assumption is another assumptionthat holds a concept’s freedom from internal contradiction sufficient toprove the possibility of the object of that concept. In Kant’s view thisunderlying assumption is false, for it rests on a confusion between differentnotions of possibility that are meant to apply to different items, namely, thelogical possibility of concepts and the real possibility of things. Kant specifiesthis distinction in a ‘warning’ footnote to the parenthesis in the abovequotation:

The concept is always possible if it does not contradict itself. That is the logical

mark of possibility . . . Yet it can nonetheless be an empty concept, if theobjective reality of the synthesis through which the concept is generated hasnot been established in particular; but . . . this always rests on principles of

possible experience and not on the principle of contradiction). This is awarning not to infer immediately from the possibility of the concept (logicalpossibility) to the possibility of the thing (real possibility).16

A concept is therefore logically possible if it does not contain twocontradictorily opposed predicates. And the logical possibility of a conceptcan be tested in the mere concept itself, in an a-priori manner by virtue ofthe law of contradiction. That is the reason why Kant sometimes tends tocall it ‘internal possibility’. Such freedom from contradiction is the purelylogical criterion for the conceivability or representability of anythingthrough a concept. Accordingly, the concept of ens realissimum is logicallypossible, because it contains the sum total only of all positive predicates.17

15Ibid., A597/B625.16Critique, A596/B624.17Kant, in the present context, does not explicitly make a distinction between positive and

negative predicates. He rather seems to take ‘predicates’ as positive attributes that make up the

real content of things: ‘Logical negation . . . is never properly attached to a concept, but rather

only to its relation to another concept in a judgment, and therefore it is far from sufficient to

designate a concept in regard to its content’ (ibid., A574/B602). In the case of the idea of ens

realissimum, as it contains all reality, it lacks no real content and thus must have only ‘positive’

predicates. That the ens realissimum has the sum total only of positive predicates can be further

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However, meeting this logical condition does not suffice to provide theconcept with objective reality; for objective reality additionally requires theapplicability of the concept in question to possible objects of experience. Assuch, the real possibility of things involves an appeal to the conditions ofpossible experience, which I will discuss in the final section on the postulatesof modalities.18 What should now be stated however is that Kant’sdistinction between the logical possibility of concepts and the real possibilityof things reinforces his main point in the refutation: the mere concept of athing cannot in itself contain a modal commitment such as the realpossibility of that thing, which refers to something ‘external’ to the concept,namely the conditions of possible experience. Accordingly, although realpossibility can be legitimately ascribed to things themselves, it cannot beintroduced a priori into the concepts of things as a predicate.

(ii) Kant’s second observation on the ontological argument is thatexistence is introduced into the concept of ens realissimum in a way thatmakes the rejection of the existence of this ens an internal contradiction. Forhim, however, this conceptual manoeuvre is itself a contradiction: ‘You havealready committed a contradiction when you have brought the concept of its

confirmed by resorting to Leibniz, whose notion of God, I believe, Kant considers here.

However, the question about the ens realissimum is whether containing only positive predicates

entails freedom from internal contradiction and thus ensures logical possibility, because there

are positive predicates that are not logically opposite to each other, and yet cannot be contained

in the same subject. For Kant’s solution to this problem that preoccupied Leibniz for a long

time, see n43. For the moment, as the logical criterion of possibility is only a formal one and

abstracts from all content, it is still not wrong to conclude that the concept of a being that

contains only positive predicates is logically possible.18This distinction is a good example of how Kant amended his precritical understanding of

modality in the Critique. In The One Possible Basis, Kant makes an apparently similar distinction

in the concept of possibility, between what he calls the formal or logical element and the real

element. The formal element of possibility, in conformity with the logical possibility of concepts,

refers to the Leibnizian notion of possibility that is constituted by freedom from contradiction

alone. On the other hand, the real element of possibility, which Kant borrowed from

Baumgarten, refers to the givenness of the material or data of possibility through which what is

to be possible is thought or represented. However, this wide field of possibility which applies to

all that is representable, given in whatever way, is narrowed in the Critique, by imposing not only

conceptual but also sensible conditions, i.e. space and time, on the givenness and consequently

on the real possibility of things. (As possibility itself is one of the modal categories, this further,

critical constraint on the notion of possibility goes along with the requirement that categories

must be applicable to sensible intuition to provide real cognition of things.) As discussed in the

final section of this essay, what is possible is thus identified with a possible object of experience.

This is how the precritical notion of the real element of possibility is developed into the notion of

real possibility in Kant’s critical programme of modality. For the precritical distinction, see The

One Possible Basis, 67. For Kant’s terminological connection with Baumgarten, see also

Heidegger, Basic Problems, 34–5, and the translator’s introduction to The One Possible Basis,

19–21; and for Kant’s specific indebtedness to Baumgarten for the form of the ontological

argument that Kant claims to refute, see Charles Hartshorne, Anselm’s Discovery: A Re-

Examination of the Ontological Proof for God’s Existence, Part Two, Chapter 10.

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existence, under whatever disguised name, into the concept of a thing whichyou would think merely in terms of its possibility.’19

Existence may be introduced into the concept of a thing, as Kantmentions, under different guises. In the Anselmian–Cartesian form of theontological argument, introduction is conducted through the notion of Godas ens perfectissimum. For instance, Anselm defines God as ‘something thanwhich nothing greater can be conceived’. From the premise that ‘somethingwhich exists in reality would be greater than something which only stands inrelation to the understanding’, he concludes that ‘it is impossible to conceiveGod as not existing.’20 In a similar way, Descartes takes the idea of asupremely perfect being and grants that existence is a perfection thatnecessarily belongs to the essence of such a being.21 Thus, the ensperfectissimum argument takes on the shape of the following syllogism:‘God, by his concept, is the most perfect being. Existence belongs to theconcept of perfection, and thus to the concept of the most perfect being.Therefore, God exists.’

Kant rejects the minor premise which carries existence, through theconcept of perfection, into the concept of God, whose very existence is inquestion. The most likely reason that Kant takes into account the ensrealissimum version of the argument is that he intends to eliminate themediatory concept of perfection, and exhibit the direct connection betweenthe introduction of existence into the concept of an exceptional being andthe false assumption that existence can be treated as an ingredient of realityin general, and of the real content of something in particular. Because forhim the crux of any form of the ontological argument lies in theintroduction of existence into the concept of something in one way oranother, the appeal to the concept of the most real being can also be putaside and the argument can be simplified in the following way: ‘Existencebelongs to the concept of God. Therefore, God exists.’

It is now easier to see how the introduction of existence into a concept (ofan object) leads to a serious problem. One can turn the above form ofsyllogism into an existence-producing machine in a way that justifies Kant’sgeneral worry about the illegitimate use of the concept of existence whichmay be extended beyond attempts to prove the existence of God.22 If such

19Critique, A597/B625. This surely is not a contradiction in the strict, logical sense of the term.

What Kant means, I think, is that while through the mere concept of a thing what could only be

tested is the concept’s logical possibility which would not even suffice to prove the real

possibility of the thing itself, introducing existence as a predicate into the concept of a thing and

thereby making an existential commitment for the thing in question would be falling into a

fundamental confusion concerning the use of modal concepts.20See Anselm, Proslogion (Chs 2–4) in The Many-faced Argument, 4–6.21‘[I] am not free to think of God without existence (that is, a supremely perfect being without a

supreme perfection) . . .’ (Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy in Selected Philosophical

Writings, 107).22Heidegger emphasizes the radical character of Kant’s objection: ‘Kant’s thesis . . . does not

assert merely that existence cannot belong to the concept of the most perfect being . . . It goes

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introduction is allowed even for a single case such as the concept of God,then there is no obstacle in principle that bans existence from beingintroduced as a predicate into the logically possible concept of any object,say the existent-X, which, in turn, makes it possible to infer the existence ofthat object from the mere concept of it without an appeal to anything else:‘Existence belongs to the concept of the existent-X. Therefore, the existent-X exists.’23

This structural purification thus makes it evident that the premise of theargument, regardless of the specific conceptual content of X, is afundamentally confused assertion that involves an illegitimate use of theconcept of existence. In the ontological argument, as Kant reconstructs it,no matter with what supreme quality God is defined in the major premise,whether as the most perfect or the most real being, the minor premise whichdoes the whole job by attaching existence to the concept of God as apredicate is an illegitimate assertion that should not be allowed in the firstplace.

Nevertheless, in order to show that even if this assertion be allowed aslegitimate, the result would in fact be no more than a ‘mere tautology’, Kantasks a crucial question about the type of relation between the predicate andthe subject of the conclusion of the argument: ‘[I]s the proposition, this orthat thing . . . exists . . . an analytic or a synthetic proposition?’24 Accordingto the Critique’s introductory account of the analytic/synthetic distinction injudgements of subject–predicate form, analytic judgements are those inwhich nothing is added through the predicate to the subject. For, in suchjudgements, predicates are only constituent concepts that are alreadycontained in the subjects and can be explicated by mere analysis. On theother hand, in synthetic judgements, through the predicate something that isnot contained in the subject is added to it.25

further. It says, fundamentally, that something like existence does not belong to the

determinateness of a concept at all’ (Heidegger, Basic Problems, 32).23The problem of the possibility of an existence producing machine is first pointed out by

Gaunilo, the immediate critic of Anselm’s argument. He argues that if the minor premise of

Anselm’s argument that ‘that which exists is more excellent than that which stands in relation to

my understanding only’ is accepted, then the mere idea of the most excellent ‘lost island’, by

virtue of its perfection, would suffice to prove that it necessarily exists. See Gaunilo and Anselm,

‘Criticism and Reply’ in The Many-faced Argument, 22–3. There are various modern objections

to Gaunilo’s argument on the ground that the idea of a greatest possible island is neither

analogous to the concept of God, nor a consistent idea for there is no end to the greatness of an

island. See, for instance, Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom and Evil (New York: Harper & Row,

1977) 91. However, as the purest form of the syllogism in the minor premise of the ontological

argument exhibits, the problem here is the very introduction of existence into the mere concept

of something, not the way in which or, as Kant would say, the disguise under which this

introduction is conducted. Thus, even if he may be said to fail to give a convincing example,

Gaunilo’s anticipation of Kant’s objection is still impressive.24Critique, A597/B625.25Ibid., A7/B11.

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From the standpoint of the proponents of the ontological argument, Kantthinks, the proposition ‘God exists’ must be analytic, for two relatedreasons. First, rejection of the predicate while retaining the subject leads tointernal contradiction only in propositions that are of analytic logicalstructure. As mentioned before, however, there is the possibility of rejectingthe subject with all its predicates, which would leave nothing to becontradicted. Therefore, even if ‘God exists’ were an analytic proposition, itsabsolute necessity would not necessitate the existence of its subject. Second,in order for the existence of God to follow from the mere concept of it,existence must already be contained in the concept of God, and thus, as apredicate, must be adding nothing to it. This, however, would make theproposition a tautology that says nothing determinate at all about God, butrepeats in its predicate what is assumed to be already contained in itssubject.

At this point Kant makes a decisive claim that some commentators findunjustified, or even contradictory: ‘in all fairness you must [concede] thatevery existential proposition is synthetic’.26 Although the strong emphasison the illegitimacy of the introduction of modal categories into the conceptsof things as predicates implies that there is no way for a modal propositionto be analytic, Kant’s claim still seems uneasy to digest. The difficulty stemsfrom the apparent incompatibility of his thesis that existence is not a realpredicate that could add to the concept of a thing with the claim that everyexistential proposition is synthetic, given the above definition of syntheticity,i.e. the kind of proposition in which the predicate adds to the subjectsomething that is not already contained in the latter. With this definition ofsyntheticity and without a proper understanding of the thesis, the intuitiveresponse would be that these two claims diametrically oppose each other;but as we proceed, we shall see that this is not quite the case.27

26Ibid., A598/B626.27Although it has never been as popular as his thesis that existence is not a real predicate, Kant’s

claim to the categorical syntheticity of all existential propositions has received serious criticisms

from the literature on the refutation. One specific criticism that has been frequently repeated by

not only the proponents but also the opponents of the ontological argument is that the latter

thesis is not compatible with the former one. For only three of the typical examples of this sort

of allegation, see Jerome Schaffer, ‘Existence, Predication, and the Ontological Argument’,

Mind, New Series, 71 (1962) No. 283: 309:

Kant defines [real predicate] as something ‘which is added to the concept of the subject

and enlarges it’. This is a most unfortunate definition for Kant to use, however, since it

leads to contradiction with another important doctrine of his, that existential

propositions are synthetic.

Nicholas Everitt, The Non-Existence Of God (London and NewYork: Routledge, 2004) 52:

This appears to commit him to saying that ‘exists’ does enlarge the subject

concept, and hence that ‘exists’ passes both tests for being a real predicate. . . Indeed,

it seems that Kant’s own words commit him to denying the thesis as well as

asserting it;

and Lenn E. Goodman, God of Abraham, 67: ‘His claim that all existential propositions are

synthetic is inconsistent with his thesis that ‘‘exists’’ is not a real predicate’. In the second part, I

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1.3 Merely Logical Predicate versus Real Predicate

In the proponents of the ontological argument, Kant observes one otherconfusion, this time with regard to the predicative character of the conceptof existence, and thus makes a distinction which is again based on thelogical/real or form/content duality:

[T]he illusion [consists] in the confusion of a logical predicate with a realone (i.e., the determination of a thing) . . . Anything one likes can serve as a

logical predicate, even the subject can be predicated of itself; for logicabstracts from every content. But the determination is a predicate, whichgoes beyond the subject and enlarges it. Thus, it must not be included in italready.28

The first thing to note here is that the logical–real predicate distinction is nota distinction of mutual exclusion. It should be clear from what Kant saysabove that ‘logical predicate’ is a functional category only, formally definedin terms of the place of a sentential unit without regard to what and how itis predicated of. Sebastian Gardner, for instance, reads this passage in thisway and understands logical predicate as ‘a predicate in the sense ofoccupying grammatical predicate position’.29 Heidegger makes a similarinterpretation, and says that the place of a concept in a sentence may qualifyit only as a logical predicate, but since this formal-logical notion of pre-dicate abstracts from all real content, we cannot yet decide whether theconcept in question is a real predicate.30 Both readings correctly imply thatthe concept of logical predicate does not exclude real predicates, and thatthe distinction in question should be rather between the predicates that are

will discuss how this way of identifying the syntheticity of propositions with the predicate’s

enlarging of the subject or its being a real predicate fails to capture the true senses of Kant’s

notions of syntheticity and existence.28Critique, A598/B626. Norman Kemp-Smith translates the original term ‘Bestimmung’ as

‘determining predicate’; compare the same quotation in Immanuel Kant, Immanuel Kant’s

Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp-Smith (New York: Palgrave, 1929). The

idea of determination being a real predicate that adds to the subject concept comes from

pure reason’s principle of thoroughgoing or complete determination of things: ‘Every thing . . .

as to its possibility . . . stands under the principle . . . according to which, among all possible

predicates of things, in so far as they are compared with their opposites, one must always apply

to it; (Critique, A572/B600). The principle is in fact a manifestation of what is required to know

things completely with their determinate contents. To know something completely, one has to

know the sum total of all possible predicates (the idea which brings about the concept of ens

realissimum, of the individual being that is determined by this idea alone) and determine the

thing through them, either affirmatively or negatively (see ibid., A573/B60). Real or determining

predicates are therefore ones that contribute to this ideal process of thoroughgoing

determination.29Sebastian Gardner, Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason (London: Routledge, 1999) 239.30See Heidegger, Basic Problems, 33–4.

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merely logical and real predicates; and consequently, that for a logicalpredicate to qualify also as a real predicate, a further requirement con-cerning content must be met: it must not be already contained in the conceptof the subject. However, things become more complicated when we try towork out this distinction’s relation to the analytic/synthetic distinction.Given the original definition of analyticity (the predicate’s being alreadycontained in the subject), the qualifying condition for a real predicateoperates negatively and qualifies all predicates of analytic judgements asmerely logical predicates. Henry Allison defends this interpretation bymaking use of the analytic/synthetic distinction as a basis for the logical/realpredicate distinction:

[S]ince the judgment [‘a body is divisible’] is analytic, the predicate ‘divisibility’

is only a logical predicate; that is to say, it does not add any furtherdeterminations to the subject beyond those already established by thecharacterization of it as a body.31

First of all, this approach provides us with one important insight. Weunderstand that the merely logical/real predicate distinction is not some-thing that can be decided by taking concepts in isolation; instead, it properlyworks only in the context of propositions. To take a simpler example: in theanalytic proposition ‘a triangle is three-sided’, the predicate ‘three-sided’ is amerely logical predicate for the obvious reason that it is already contained inthe concept of the subject ‘triangle’. By contrast, in the synthetic proposition‘my table is three-sided’, the very same concept serves as a real predicate.The key point is the word ‘further’ in Allison’s explanation. Although three-sidedness seems to be a genuine determination of any triangular object, itdoes not add anything further to the concept of triangle beyond what isalready and necessarily there. Therefore, the distinction is not dependentonly and ultimately upon the predicate-concept, but also upon the subjectconcept, or more precisely upon the relation (of containment/inclusion)between them.

This way of grounding the merely logical/real predicate distinction uponthe analytic/synthetic distinction is fine in qualifying the predicates of

31Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven

and London: Yale University Press, 1983) 71; my emphasis. In some of his critical works Kant

prefers to call real predicates synthetic predicates, and thereby applies the analytic/synthetic

distinction to predicates themselves in a way that allows Allison’s interpretation. See, for

example, Lectures on Metaphysics, 28: 552: ‘We call determinations not analytic predicates

[praedicata analytica] but rather synthetic predicates [praedicata synthetica]’. However, as will be

discussed in the rest of this essay, given the exceptional status of modal propositions, the

syntheticity of propositions does not warrant qualifying their predicates as real, determining or

synthetic predicates. Kant puts this clearly: ‘. . . we have introduced the categories: possibility,

actuality, and necessity, and then we deemed that they are not at all determinations of a thing,

or synthetic predicates’ (ibid., 29: 822).

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analytic propositions as merely logical. However, if the same approach isapplied symmetrically to infer the realness of predicates from thesyntheticity of propositions, it does not work, and, as discussed before,even invites charges of inconsistency in one exceptional case, namely, that ofexistential (or in general modal) propositions. Kant holds the view that allexistential propositions are synthetic, and although we have not yet startedto investigate what it actually means, we know that the high point of Kant’soverall account of the concept of existence is the dictum ‘existence is not areal predicate’. Therefore, contrary to what was concluded above, Kanttakes the concept of existence in isolation, and universally claims that allexistential propositions are synthetic and that existence is never a realpredicate, no matter which particular subject is being said to exist. AsKant’s fundamental objection in the ontological argument was to theintroduction of existence into the concept of something, existence can neverbe already contained as a predicate in the subject concept of a proposition, itis always outside. This immediately entails that existential propositions arecategorically non-analytic. However, besides the fact that existence cannotbe contained in a subject, as will be explained in the following section, it isnot a real, determining predicate either; that is, it does not add any furtherdeterminations to any subject, and thus does not enlarge it. If no ‘new’ orfurther determination is added to the subject through the predicate ‘exists’,what is, if any, actually added to the subject in existential propositions, ormore generally, what kind of synthesis is conducted in existentialpropositions? As it is evident even at this early stage of our inquiry thatexistential propositions must be synthetic in a different way than one we canunderstand with the definitions and the related terminology we havehitherto used, do we need to revise our original definition of syntheticity andeliminate some of the binding constraints such as ‘addition’, ‘furtherdetermination’ or ‘enlargement’? Neither of these questions can besatisfactorily answered before discussing why existence is not a realpredicate; but it can be securely concluded by now that the reason whyexistence is a merely logical predicate is neither because it can be containedin the concept of a subject, nor because existential propositions are analytic.While it is indeed possible to claim that analyticity of a proposition is asufficient condition for its predicate to be merely logical, given theexceptional case of existential propositions it is not a necessary condition.Conversely, given the same exceptional case, not being already contained inthe subject is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a predicate to bereal. As a final remark I should add that in this section I basically intendedto show what Kant’s distinction between merely logical and real predicatesamounts to. As Kant introduces the distinction in order to introduce histhesis that existence is not a real predicate, the relevance of the former to theontological argument is intimately connected to the latter. How Kant thinkshis thesis refutes the argument, I will return to aftert inquiring into the fullmeaning of the thesis with its positive counterpart.

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2. THESES ON EXISTENCE

Having reviewed the distinctions that form the essential background ofKant’s negative thesis concerning existence, let us now focus on the thesisitself. Its clearest formulation in the Critique is the following: ‘Being isobviously not a real predicate, i.e., a concept of something that could add tothe concept of a thing. It is merely the positing of a thing or of certaindeterminations in themselves.’32 There are two assertions here. The firstsentence says what ‘being’ is not, and the second says what it is. Althoughthese assertions are in fact negative and positive aspects of the same thesis, Iwould like to discuss them separately, at least until reaching a betterposition for understanding how they supplement each other.

2.1 Existence is Not a Real Predicate

Significantly, it is not ‘existence’ (Existenz or Dasein), but ‘being’ (Sein),that is declared not to be a real predicate.33 On the other hand, the title ofthe first section of The One Possible Basis makes the same negativeassertion for ‘existence’, and it does so even in a more radical fashion:‘Existence is not a predicate or determination of any thing.’34 One maywonder whether using ‘being’ instead of ‘existence’ makes any differencefor what is intended by the thesis, or whether the choice of words isarbitrary. It is certainly not. The reason behind Kant’s choice in theCritique may be that he wants to put more emphasis on the relationbetween the concepts of existence and being. For in both accounts, heattempts an entirely original way of reconstructing this relation throughthe introduction of the concept of positing.

In the first, negative assertion, not being a real predicate is explained asnot being a concept which could add (or could be added, as the Kemp-Smithtranslation renders it) to the concept of a thing. This incapacity to add to theconcept of a thing has a dual implication. First, it cannot in any way becontained in the concept of a thing, and consequently it cannot add a furtherdetermination to the conceptual content of a thing. It is actually this secondconstraint that makes ‘being’ a non-real and merely logical predicate initself, independently of the proposition in which it occupies grammatically

32Critique, A599/B627.33Compare the mentioned quotation in Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft

(Werkausgabe Band IV), (Frankfurt am Main: Shurkamp, 1996): ‘Sein ist offenbar kein reales

Pradikat . . .’.34The One Possible Basis, 57; my emphasis. Compare ibid., 56: ‘Das Dasein ist gar kein Pradikat

oder Determination von irgend einem Dinge’. This shortcut formulation of Kant might have

been thought as the textual source of the widely exemplified misconception of his thesis in the

literature, i.e. that it is not a predicate at all; but then in the same text, Kant goes on to explain

the sense in which existence may be used as a predicate.

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the predicate position. This reconfirms that a clear-cut approach that issolely based on the analytic/synthetic distinction is not the best instrumentto understand the predicative behaviour of being that the thesis suggests.

The approach that I would like to propose here focuses on the relationbetween two terms that Kant uses to refer to the kinds of predicate thatexistence is not, namely, ‘real predicate’ and ‘determination’. A realpredicate is a determination, that is, a predicate that contributes to thethoroughgoing determination of a thing,35 and the reason why suchdetermining predicates are called real lies in the peculiar sense in which theterm ‘reality’ (Realitat, Sachheit) is employed by Kant. Unlike the modernnotion that is usually identified with actual existence, the Kantian notion ofreality, at least in the context of our discussion, has an indifferent, neutralsense with regard to the actuality of things; it rather refers to the possible orconceptual contents of things without making any existential commitment.36

As Kant states in the second section of the ‘Ideal of Pure Reason’, the ideaof all reality (omnitudo realitatis) which is the totality of the particular thing-contents functions as the a-priori condition of the thoroughgoingdetermination of things; it is the sum total of all possible (positive)predicates from which the particular conceptual content of each and everything is derived. The concept of ens realissimum, as the ideal individualobject that corresponds to this idea of all reality, lacks no possible content.It follows that the particular conceptual content of a thing is the totality ofthe predicates it has. As this account is still at the level of non-contextualtalk of predicates, Kant does not yet differentiate at this point amongpredicates as being merely logical or real. However the very predicates that

35See n28.36Heidegger grounds his interpretation of Kant’s thesis on the importance of this sense of

‘reality’, which, he claims, is adopted by Kant from Scholastic terminology:

When Kant talks about the omnitudo realitatis, the totality of all realities, he means

not the whole of all beings actually extant but, just the reverse, the whole of all

possible thing-determinations, the whole of all thing-contents or real-contents,

essences, possible things. Accordingly, realitas is synonymous with Leibniz’s term

possibilitas, possibility. Realities are the what-contents of possible things in general

without regard to whether or not they are actual, or ‘real’ in our modern sense;

(Heidegger, Basic Problems, 34)

For a similar articulation of the distinction between reality and existence in Kant’s language, see

also Wolfgang Schwarz, ‘Kant’s Categories of Reality and Existence’, Philosophy and

Phenomenological Research, 48 (December 1987) No. 2: 343–6. As Heidegger finds it

synonymous with the Leibnizian notion of possibility, I think this sense of reality is better

captured by Kant’s precritical notion of ‘real element of possibility’ that I alluded to in n18. Just

like the real element of possibility, it designates a neutral notion of possibility. It is free of any

modal reference in the critical sense; that is, it does not involve a reference to the agreement of

the object with the conditions of experience in general, but it refers solely to the data or content

that is represented by the concept. Traces of this precritical neutral notion of possibility are still

present in the Critique, and at times it becomes a really taxing business to differentiate the sense

in which Kant uses the term ‘possibility’.

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are talked about here must be, at least potentially, determining predicates,for they are said to contribute to the thoroughgoing determination of thingsand to make up the contents of things. We can therefore defer ourpropositional concerns such as the criterion of ‘further determination’ or‘enlargement’, and limit our present inquiry to what kinds of concept thesepotentially real predicates may be.37

Heidegger situates Kant’s thesis on existence historically in the traditionof ancient and medieval ontology.38 Besides its theological character,Heidegger observes that a dogmatic assumption has dominated this line oftraditional ontology: to each being there belongs a what and a way or modeof being, essentia and existentia.39 Accordingly, the essence of a thing iswhat makes it as it is, what defines or determines a thing with respect to theparticular attributes it has, or in the above-mentioned Kantian use of theterm, it is the particular reality of a thing. As the etymologies of both ‘de-finitio’ and ‘de-terminatio’ would suggest, essence is what sets the limits of athing. This also conforms to the spirit of the principle of thoroughgoingdetermination; for the particularities of things are determined throughvarying degrees of limitations of the unlimited totality of all possible

37Richard Campbell, in his ‘Real Predicates and ‘‘Exists’’‘, suggests a misleading reading of

Kant’s discourse of real or determining predicates. Campbell’s idea is that ‘although the notion

of a determining predicate is to be understood relative to a given judgment’, the notion of a real

predicate is not. He obviously assumes a distinction between the meanings of the two terms,

which, I believe, Kant uses interchangeably to refer to the same notion. Without giving a

satisfactory account of the distinction he has in mind, he bases his own, revised definition of

a real predicate upon this alleged distinction: ‘. . . a real predicate is one which is apt to serve as a

determining predicate’, or again in the footnote to the former definition, ‘one which could add a

determination in some judgment’ (96). I have the impression that Campbell takes ‘real

predicate’ as a broader notion to mean a concept that has a capacity to function as a

determining predicate, whether or not it actually does so. That is probably why he thinks the

notion of a real predicate, in contradistinction with that of a determining predicate, is not

relative to a propositional context. However, besides introducing an unnecessary and

unexplained distinction between real and determining predicates, Campbell understands Kant’s

negative thesis concerning existence as a positive definition of a real predicate, and thus reads

the ‘could’ in ‘Being is not . . . a concept of something that could add to the concept of a thing’

as a capacity that every real predicate, in isolation from any propositional context, must have. I

suggest, however, that the ‘could’ in question refers to the context-independent incapacity of

‘being’ or ‘existence’ to add to the concept of a thing as a predicate, and thus classifies existence

as a non-real predicate, tout court. On the other hand, a real or determining predicate is one

which actually adds (a further determination) to the concept of a thing in a given proposition.

What Campbell defines as a concept that could or is apt to add a determination to the concept of

a thing, without any mention of a propositional context, may correspond in my account only to

what I classified above as a potentially real or determining predicate. See Richard Campbell,

‘Real Predicates and ‘Exists’, Mind, New Series, 83 (January 1974) No. 329: 95–9.38See Heidegger, Basic Problems, 29–34.39Heidegger devotes the entire second chapter of his Basic Problems to the history of this

assumption.

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predicates. On the other hand, the mode of being of a thing says nothingwhatsoever about the attributes it has, nothing about what it really is, butonly points out the specific sense or way in which it is.40

It should be clear by now that the candidate concepts for determiningpredicates are to be sought among the possible attributes or properties ofthings that specify, differentiate and define their particular characters, theirwhatness. Now, within the Kantian territories, the suitable place to trace theage-old distinction between the what and the mode of being of things is thetable of categories, which is, as Kant himself acknowledges, adopted fromAristotle’s list of categories with major structural modifications.41 As far asthe distinction between essence and existence is concerned, two classes ofcategory in the table come to the fore: the categories of quality (reality,negation and limitation), and the categories of modality (possibility/impossibility, existence/non-existence, necessity/contingency). It is ofextreme significance that Kant entitles the positive or affirmative categoryof quality reality.42 Reality was said to be the transcendental totality of allpossible positive predicates of things. In the ideal thoroughgoingdetermination of a thing, each and every one of these positive predicatesis either affirmed or denied of the very thing in question. The possiblecontent of any individual thing other than God is thus determinately limitedin this or that degree with respect to this unlimited totality.43 All this is to

40This distinction can be traced back to Aristotle and his early medieval commentators such as

Aquinas. At many places in his Metaphysics, Aristotle distinguishes the categories as the figures

of predication, or more precisely, as the attributes that constitute the essence of an individual

thing, from the other ways in which a thing is said to be, i.e. being accidentally, being as truth,

being potentially or actually. See especially, Aristotle, Metaphysics in The Complete Works of

Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984) 1026a 33ff.

Aquinas, in his On Being and Essence, clarifies that the term ‘essence’ applies only to the first

sense of being that is divided into ten categories, and points out that as it is what is signified by

the definition of what the thing is, essence is also called by the name ‘whatness;’ see St Thomas

Aquinas, Selected Writings, translated and edited by Ralph McInerny (London: Penguin

Books, 1998) 31. In his Lectures on Metaphysics, Kant himself repeatedly draws this categorical

distinction between essentia and existentia, or what and modes of being and calls modes

‘extraessential’ properties that do not belong to the essence of a thing; see, for example, ibid.,

28: 553.41Critique, A80, B106.42‘[T]ranscendental affirmation . . . is called reality (thinghood)’ (ibid., A574/B602).43Kant makes a warning about the original function of the ens realissimum in the derivation of

the particular possibilities of things:

The derivation of all other possibility from this original being . . . cannot be regarded

as a limitation of its highest reality and as a division, as it were of it; for then the

original being would be regarded as a mere aggregate of derivative beings . . . Rather,

the highest reality would ground the possibility of all things as a ground and not as a

sum total; the manifoldness of the former rests not on the limitation of the original

being itself, but on its complete consequences.

(ibid., A579/B607)

Kant is aware that his previous discourse of ‘possessing/containing all reality’ may lead the

reader to a Spinozistic notion of God, which he thinks, as containing all realities within itself,

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say that a single determination, affirmative or negative, of a particular thingis only possible in a judgement with a specific function corresponding to aspecific class of categories, namely, quality.44 Therefore, the notion ofquality as the name of a class of category is quite different from itsAristotelian sense. It does not refer directly to the qualitative attributes ofactual things, but rather to the specific way in which the concepts ofattributes are related to the concept of the subject in a judgement. Thisrelation is that of ascription by way of affirmation (in affirmativejudgements), or denial by way of negation (in negative judgements), eitherof which may lead to a certain advance in the determination of the thingdesignated by the subject in question.45 As Heidegger nicely puts it: ‘Byquality Kant refers to that character of judgmental positing which indicateswhether a predicate is ascribed to a subject, whether it is affirmed of the

suffers from real internal conflicts. Kant addresses this problem of real conflicts in the

Amphiboly, where he directly criticizes Leibniz:

the principle that realities (as mere affirmations) never logically oppose each other . . .

signifies nothing at all either in regard to nature nor overall in regard to anything in

itself (of this we have no concept). For real opposition always obtains . . . i.e., where

one reality, if combined in one subject with another, cancels out the effect of the latter

(ibid., A273/B329)

This problem, which Kant has had in mind even in the precritical period, was what required a

revision in the Leibnizian–Wolffian notion of possibility, whose only criterion is freedom from

logical contradiction; hence the Baumgartenian distinction between the logical and real element

of possibility that I explained in n18. However, Kant’s ground notion of God, together with the

notion of particular possibilities (or realities) as its consequences, avoids such real oppositions.

In The One Possible Basis, Kant proposes a similar solution by dividing possibilities into two

classes with respect to their relation with God, namely the ones that belong to its own

determinations and the ones that belong to its consequences. See, ibid., 83–5. Here, it is also

useful to keep in mind the distinction between the idea of the sum total (of all reality) and the

ideal of the most real being; for what is limited in deriving particular possibilities is the former

but strictly not the latter.44The quality of judgements is not in fact the only function that has to do with the content of a

judgement. See, for example, Critique, B100, where Kant implies that except for the modality of

judgements, all other three functions (quality, quantity and relation) constitute the content of a

judgement. However, our present inquiry is about the determination of particular thing-

contents, or of particular subjects in judgements, and as will be seen, about the use of the ‘is’ of

predication in such determination. In other words, we are dealing with the kinds of judgement

that pertain to the ‘reality’ of things. Therefore, the direct focus of our account will be

qualitative judgements that are particular with respect to their function of quantity and

categorical with respect to their function of relation.45Infinite judgements and the corresponding category of limitation have a special place in the

qualitative relation between the subject and the predicate. As they contain a peculiar sort of

affirmation made by means of a merely negative predicate, infinite judgements do not

immediately determine the object of the subject, but placing the subject in a separated class of

beings within the infinite domain of all possible beings, they contribute, in a limiting way, to the

content of our cognition in general. This limiting function of infinite judgements is also one of

the marks that distinguishes Kant’s transcendental logic from what he calls ‘general logic’; see,

for example, Critique, A72–3 and A574/B602.

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subject or opposed to it, that is denied of it.’46 Existence and othercategories of modality have nothing to do with the said determination ofthings; they belong to a different class of categories. What kind of relation isasserted in modal judgements, and particularly in existential ones, will bediscussed when we come to the positive thesis concerning existence, but forthe present it is clear that the ascription of existence, or of other modes, to asubject can by no means contribute to the determination of the content orwhatness of the object of that subject.47 Such determination is conducted inqualitative judgements, and it is done without any regard to the mode inwhich the object of the subject is, that is, without regard to whether it ismerely possible, actual or necessary. That is why existence is not a realpredicate or determination, no matter to what subject it may be ascribed,but is always a merely logical predicate.

We have thus seen what kinds of concept have the capacity to determinethings in what kinds of judgement. However, they must still satisfy thecontextual constraint of ‘enlargement’ to qualify as real, determiningpredicates. As was shown before, the very same concept may serve both as amerely logical predicate and as a real predicate in different propositionalcontexts. Enlargement of the subject is only possible when the predicate isnot already contained in it. One has to be careful about this. The discourseof ‘enlargement’, ‘containment’ or ‘addition’ may be quite misleading here,if such terms give us the wrong impression that only positive predicationscontribute to the determination of things. Negations too may well beregarded as determining. ‘To determine is nothing other than to posit one oftwo opposites’, that is to say, it is to affirm or deny a real (positive) predicatein its relation to the subject of a proposition.48 Therefore, the crucialquestion is whether the proposition, in an affirmative or negative way, servesto decrease the indeterminacy of the object of the subject concept withrespect to the sum total of all possible predicates.49 I would suggest that thispoint is better captured by Allison’s rather neutral term ‘further determina-tion.’ After this note, we can reformulate our constraint: a proposition

46Heidegger, Basic Problems, 36.47Kant explains the indifference of modal categories to the ‘reality’ or determination of things

more clearly in Lectures on Metaphysics:

Everything that exists is, to be sure, thoroughly determined . . . Existence, however, is

not a concept of thoroughgoing determination . . . Existence thus gives no further

predicate to the thing . . . Existence is not a separate reality, although everything that

exists must have a reality. Existence, possibility, actuality, and necessity are special

kinds of categories which do not at all contain predicates of things, but rather only

modes;

(ibid., 28: 554)48Lectures on Metaphysics, 28: 552.49Van Cleve makes exactly the same point: ‘Note that ‘‘enlarge’’ may be a misleading term,

insofar as enlarging a concept typically results in narrowing its extension.’ See Problems From

Kant, 188.

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further determines the object of its subject concept, only if the object of thesubject concept is not already determined with respect to the predicate ofthat proposition; in other words, only if the predicate is not already affirmedor denied of the subject. Accordingly, if the object of the subject concept isthus further determined by the proposition, the predicate is not only alogical but also a real predicate.50

2.2 Existence is Absolute Positing

Having thus settled what existence is not and why, let us turn back to Kant’sown formulation of his twin theses about being, and try to elicit what hesays existence is.

Being is obviously not a real predicate, i.e., a concept of something that couldadd to the concept of a thing. It is merely the positing of a thing or of certain

determinations in themselves.51

Taking up the positive assertion, we are now faced with the concept ofposition or positing, the discussion of which I have deliberately deferred upto this very point. Although it is possible to obtain some understanding ofthe concept of positing through a close reading of the passages in which it isused, Kant puts the concept into the text of the Critique as if it had anobvious meaning. However, he gives a clue in The One Possible Basis: ‘Theconcept of position or positing [Position oder Setzung] is totally simple andon the whole identical with the concept of being in general.’52 The identitybetween the concepts of positing and being in general suggests nothing at

50In his Lectures on Metaphysics, Kant applies the logical/real duality to the concept of

essence.

A logical essence [he says] is the first inner ground of all logical predicates of a thing; a

real essence is the first inner ground of all determinations of an essence . . . Logical

essence is found through principles of analysis: but real essence through principles of

synthesis;

(ibid., 28: 553)

Regarding the problem of further determination, we can thus conclude that the predicates that

we reach through the analysis of a concept are merely logical predicates and the ones that

further determine this complex of logical predicates (logical essence) through synthesis are real

predicates. However, there is still the exception of modes which Kant calls ‘extraessential’

properties. Although they can be contained neither in the logical essence (we cannot reach the

mode of a subject through its analysis) nor in the real essence of a thing, they can function as

logical predicates in modal propositions, because as long as it occupies the predicate position

‘anything one likes can serve as a logical predicate’.51Critique, A599/B627.52The One Possible Basis, 59. The literal translation of the German word ‘Setzung’ is ‘setting’;

but, as Heidegger says, it is not more helpful than ‘positing’: ‘[O]ur German word Setzung is just

as ambiguous as the Latin positio. The latter can mean: (1) Setting, placing, laying as action. (2)

Something set, the theme. (3) Setness, site, constitution’ (Martin Heidegger, ‘Kant’s Thesis

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this stage, but Kant goes on to extend what he has just said to a furtherdomain:

Now something can be posited as merely relational; or better, be thought

merely as the relation (respectus logicus) of something as a property of a thing.Then being, that is the position of this relation, is only the copulative conceptin a judgment. Should not only this relation but the thing in and for itself be

viewed as posited, then this being is the same as existence.53

What this statement means as a whole will become clearer as we proceed,but for now I would just like to point out that what is described here as‘the position of the relation of something as a property of a thing’ isnothing different than what I have described before as the function of thecategory of reality in qualitative judgements, namely, the ascription of apredicate to the subject by way of affirmation, regardless of whether ornot the object that is represented through the subject concept actuallyexists.54 Therefore, it turns out that we already know at least half ofwhat seemed at first so enigmatic, namely, positing in the relative sense.

The account quoted above from The One Possible Basis first identifiesbeing in general with positing, and then defines it with respect to its purelylogical function: ‘Being is only the copulative concept in a judgment.’ That isto say, being is the ‘is’ in a qualitative judgement. When taken as such, itbecomes ‘obvious’ that being is not a real predicate. As the ‘is’ ofpredication, being is not even a concept of its own but only the linking wordthat posits the relation between the predicate and the subject. Kant makes amore explicit formulation of the function of the ‘is’ of predication in theCritique:

In the logical use it is merely the copula of a judgement. The proposition, ‘Godis omnipotent’, contains two concepts that have their objects: God and

omnipotence; the small word ‘is’ is not a predicate, but only that which positsthe predicate in relation to the subject.55

Therefore, by the ‘is’ of predication, which is itself not a predicate, thepredicate is posited in relation to the subject. As the locus of a qualitativejudgement, this relation is of the nature of an ascription, that is, what isexpressed by the positing of this relation is that the property thought in theconcept of the predicate belongs to the thing thought in the concept of thesubject. Only this relation of ascription or belonging, or more precisely, only

about Being’ in Pathmarks, 343). All these senses amount to the idea that to be is to be set in (or

to have) a position.53The One Possible Basis, 59.54See n44.55Critique, A599/B627.

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the predicate in this relation as belonging to the subject is posited there, andnothing more. Nothing whatsoever is posited as to whether the object of thesubject concept actually is or the mode in which it is; for qualitativejudgements operate at the level of reality, which in this specific context issynonymous with a neutral, agnostic notion of possibility that is devoid ofany existential connotation, or even of any reference to a real possibility.56

Kant warns aptly:

If I say ‘God is omnipotent’, only this logical relation between God andomnipotence is thought since the latter is a property of the former. Nothingfurther is posited here. Whether God is . . . is by no means contained in that.

Thus this being [expressed by the copula] is quite properly used even for therelations that non-entities have to one another.57

It would not be wrong to say that all predicates that have the capacity todetermine the whatness of things are posited as merely relational, as relativeto a subject. How, then, is the mode of being of a thing posited? How is, forinstance, existence, which is categorically a merely logical predicate and thuslacks the capacity to determine a thing, posited? Or, what is exactly positedin an existential proposition? A previously quoted sentence gives a solid hintas to what is posited in an existential proposition: ‘Should . . . the thing inand for itself be viewed as posited, then this being is the same as existence.’What it means for a ‘thing in and for itself’ to be posited, we do not knowyet; but as in the case of relative positing we discussed the copulativefunction of being as the ‘is’ of predication, it is obvious that we should now

56See n18.57The One Possible Basis, 61. This suggestion of Kant, together with his general attitude

concerning the ‘is’ of predication, that we do not commit ourselves to an ontological position on

the existence or even on the objective reality of the subject by ascribing a predicate to it, may

invite some semantic objections. In modern logical theory, whether the truth of positive

propositions requires or implies the existence of the subject, or whether propositions about non-

existent entities have a truth-value at all are controversial questions. But it will not be wrong to

say that it is a fairly common interpretation that predicates can be ascribed with truth only to

existing things, or in other words, ‘the being that is expressed by the copula’ is not as indifferent

to the existence of the subject as Kant suggests. In relation to the same point, Van Cleve brings

up a quite reasonable doubt that I myself would share: whether Kant is here committing himself

to a Meinongian ontology, or to the so-called Independence Principle. However, he

distinguishes Kant from Meinong by referring to the possibility of reconstructing Kant’s

qualitative judgements as conditionals:

Not necessarily, for his observation [that ‘God is omnipotent’ is true even if God does

not exist] can be accommodated by construing the predication as a conditional: if any

being is God, that being is omnipotent. That in turn can be construed as asserting a

link between two concepts rather than a link between a Meinongian object and a

predicate.

(See Van Cleve, Problems From Kant, 304)

For a relevant discussion, see also Adams, Leibniz:DTI, 159–60.

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inquire into being as existence, that is, being as the ‘is’ of existence. Let uskeep following Kant from the Critique:

Now if I take the subject (God) together with all his predicates (among which

omnipotence belongs), and say God is, or there is a God, then I add no newpredicate to the concept of God, but only posit the subject in itself with all itspredicates, and indeed posit the object in relation to my concept.58

This decisive passage can be read in two steps. First, in an existentialproposition, what is posited is not a particular predicate in relation to thesubject, but rather the whole subject with all its predicates, with its wholeconceptual content. Surely, as nothing is further determined in the conceptof the subject by an existential proposition, ‘all predicates’ that are positedwith the subject here are the ones which are already (analytically) containedin it. Second, in the positing of the subject with all its predicates, the object(of the subject concept) is posited ‘in relation to my concept’, which is to saythat what is posited is in fact the actual thing as corresponding to theconcept I have of it. In other words, what I think in the subject concept asthe mere idea of a possible object is posited as an actual object existingoutside of that concept. However, while thus switching from the merelypossible to the actual, nothing is added in terms of content, or as was saidabove, nothing is further determined. It is a switch in the mode of beingalone. As for the ‘God’ in ‘God is omnipotent’ and the ‘God’ in ‘God is’ orin ‘God exists’, Kant says, ‘Both must contain exactly the same, and hencewhen I think this object as given absolutely (through the expression, ‘‘it is’’),nothing new is thereby added to the concept, which expresses merely itspossibility.’ He concludes, ‘The actual contains nothing more than themerely possible.’59 Hence, Kant’s well-known example of the hundreddollars: ‘A hundred actual dollars do not contain the least bit more than ahundred possible ones.’60 A hundred possible dollars is what is merelythought in the concept, a hundred actual dollars is what is also absolutelyposited as the existing object that corresponds to the concept. Neither ofthem, however, is more real in the Kantian sense of the term; they haveexactly the same what-content, ‘not more, not less’. Otherwise, the actualmoney would not correspond to what I think in its concept as merely

58Critique, A599/B627.59Ibid., A599/B627. This dictum (and the following example of hundred dollars), Kant seems to

intend as a direct reply to Leibniz who repeatedly states the opposite of what Kant says about

the relation between existence and degrees of reality and sees existence as the complement of

possibility: It is clear . . . that Existence is a perfection, or increases reality; that is, when existing

A is conceived, more reality is conceived than when possible A is conceived’; ‘[Y]et if we

consider more accurately, [we shall see] that we conceive something more when we think that a

thing A exists, than when we think it is possible;’ respectively quoted in Adams, Leibniz: DTI,

120, 165.60Critique, A599/B627.

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possible, and we would be talking instead about two concepts with differentcontents.

There is, however, an apparent difficulty in Kant’s argument that hasaroused objections by some opponents of Kant’s refutation. The idea of theexact congruency between the conceptual contents of the possible and theactual seems incompatible with the metaphysical principle ‘what exists isthoroughly determined’, which Kant seems to endorse too. Although thecritical Kant situates thorough determination in the faculty of reason as amere regulative idea that can never be attained in concreto,61 it can still besaid within the critical framework that an actually existing object is alwaysmore determined or has more determinate content in itself than its mereconcept, through which we only think of the predicates that are analyticallycontained in the definition of that object. Alvin Plantinga emphasizes thispoint:

of course it will not be true that the concept of an object contains as muchcontent as the object itself. Consider, for example, the concept horse. Any real

horse will have many properties not contained in that concept; any real horsewill be either more than 16 hands high or else 16 hands or less. But neither ofthese properties is in the content of the concept horse.62

Morrris Engel raises a similarly grounded objection to Kant: ‘. . . a personmight still argue that we can never be sure that our concepts are adequateexpressions of things or perfectly conform to their archetypes’.63 AlthoughKant’s language seems to leave him vulnerable to these criticisms, the exactcongruency of the actual object with its concept is not relevant to the pointKant wants to make. First of all, the congruency Kant presupposes is notbetween an actual object and the general concept under which we define thatobject with its necessary predicates, but between an object as actually givenand the individual concept of the very same object through which we think itas merely possible (in the logical sense). Second, the appropriate questionhere is not whether my concept is or can be wholly adequate to its actualobject, but whether ascription of actuality or existence to the object of myconcept adds a further determination or a further real predicate to it, orwhether the content of my concept is ‘enlarged’ in the least by saying that itsobject actually exists.64 All Kant strives to underline is that existence hasnothing to do with the contents of things and cannot be contained in orintroduced into their concepts. As he puts it much more clearly just after

61See ibid., A573/B601.62Alvin Plantinga, ‘Kant’s Objection to the Ontological Argument’, 539–40.63S. Morris Engel, ‘Kant’s ‘Refutation’ of the Ontological Argument’, Philosophy and

Phenomenological Research, 24 (September 1963) No. 1: 30.64For Wolfgang Schwarz’s apt reply to Engel in relation to this point, see Wolfgang Schwarz,

‘Professor Engel on Kant’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 25 (March 1965) No. 3:

409.

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giving the example of hundred dollars, ‘Thus, when I think a thing, throughwhichever and however many predicates I like (even in its thoroughgoingdetermination), not the least bit gets added to the thing when I posit inaddition that this thing is.’65 In this sense, apart from the fact that a hundredactual dollars would make me better off in actual life than a hundredpossible dollars would do, the actuality or absolute positing of a hundreddollars does not add anything to the content of a hundred dollars as merelypossible. The only difference between them is their modes of being. One isactual, the other is merely possible. This categorial distinction between thecontents and the modes of being of things also explains why the mereconceivability of the ens realissimum, the most real being with a perfectlycomplete content, does not ensure the assertion of its actuality: ‘the questionstill remains whether it exists or not’.66 Any answer to the question ofexistence, as existence (or any mode of being) cannot be contained withinthe mere concept of a thing, is to be sought outside the conceptual contentsof things, however much they may contain. Accordingly, any argument thatattempts to extend our knowledge of what exists by speculating from withinmere concepts alone is bound to fail. This is the point where Kant’sparticular objection to the ontological proof, i.e. that existence is not a realpredicate, meets his general critique of speculative proofs, all of which, hethinks, rely heavily on the former.67

How Kant understands this ‘outside’ is also related to the crucial questionof whether and to what extent Kant’s refutation is consistent with his criticalphilosophy, and will be investigated in the proceeding section. But beforeleaving our inquiry into the refutation, it will be helpful to sum up theaccount of Kant’s notions of positing and existence that I have presented inthe last two sections.

65Critique, A601/B62866Ibid., A601/B628.67I believe I have already said enough of why Kant thinks that his thesis concerning existence is

a basic ground of attack that might suffice to refute the ontological argument as he reconstructs

it. I should add here, however, that the force of the thesis to refute the ontological argument is

not universally accepted, even among those who accept the thesis itself. Van Cleve, for instance,

claims that existence is not a real predicate, even if it is assumed as true, is irrelevant or at least

harmless to Descartes’s argument. See his Problems from Kant, 189. A much more radical claim

is one made by Nakhnikian and Salmon: ‘The treatment of ‘‘exists’’ as a real predicate does not

render the ontological argument valid. If anything, it helps to clarify the invalidity of the

argument’. See George Nakhnikian, Wesley C. Salmon, ‘‘‘Exists’’ as a Predicate’, The

Philosophical Review, 66 (October 1957) No. 4: 542. As I declared at the beginning, my concern

in this paper is not to discuss and take a position on the validity or soundness either of the

ontological argument, or of Kant’s alleged refutation of it, but to understand Kant’s notion of

existence by the help of his thesis as presented in the context of the refutation. In relation to

these objections, I should be content with just stating my basic approach to them. One may not

be convinced by Kant’s reconstruction of the ontological argument; and one may have reasons

for rejecting the thesis as well; but challenging that the latter is relevant to the former in the

specific way Kant suggests can only be an indication of an improper understanding of either one

or the other or both.

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Now, the positing of a predicate in relation to the subject, Kant callsrelative positing. On the other hand, the positing of a subject ‘in and foritself’ without reference to any relation with a particular predicate, heentitles absolute positing.68 Therefore, being in an unqualified sense ispositing in general; being as the ‘is’ of predication is relative positing; andfinally, being as the ‘is’ of existence, or in Kant’s own words, being which is‘the same as existence’ is absolute positing. Given the definition of a realpredicate as discussed extensively in this paper, the full meaning of theoriginal thesis is that ‘being’ is not a real predicate, either in the sense ofrelative positing or in the sense of absolute positing. That is why existence,independently of any propositional context, is not a real predicate but only alogical predicate.

2.3 The Syntheticity of Existential Propositions and The Third Thesis on

Existence

Having put forward different aspects of why existence is not a real predicatebut only a logical predicate whose function is positing the subject of aproposition absolutely, let us now turn back to the important question thatwas raised in 1.3, and left unanswered: why are existential propositionssynthetic? More specifically now, if existential propositions do not posit arelation between two concepts, namely, predicate and subject, or do notposit one concept as relative to the other, but only posit one concept (thesubject), absolutely in and for itself, in what sense are they synthetic? As anysynthesis is of at least two entities, what do they synthesize? Or is absolutepositing not really absolute?

That absolute positing too implies a relation in itself is in fact evidentfrom the discourse Kant prefers to use in the Critique. As repeatedlyreported, absolute positing of a subject is the positing of it in itself with allits predicates ‘as an object that stands in relation to my concept’. Then,whereas relative positing posits a relation between two concepts, i.e. thepredicate and the subject, absolute positing posits a relation between aconcept and an actual object, i.e. my subject concept and the object ofthat concept. In absolute positing, nothing but the actual thing itself iscombined with the subject concept. Thus, Kant concludes ‘By the predicate‘existence’ I add nothing to the thing, but rather add the thing itself to theconcept’.69

68Maybe not in the Critique explicitly, but in the title of the second section of the first chapter of

The One Possible Basis Kant uses the term ‘absolute position’: ‘Das Dasein ist die absolute

Position eines Dinges’.69Immanuel Kant, Werke, Akademieausgabe, Vol. 18, No. 6276, quoted in Heidegger, ‘Kant’s

Thesis about Being’, Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill (Cambridge and New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1998) 344.

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With this formulation, we see that existential propositions are inconformity with at least one aspect of syntheticity, i.e. through thepredicate-concept something that is not contained in the subject conceptis added to it. Hereby we also obtain the answer to the question of what isactually added to the subject in existential propositions. When existenceis ascribed to a subject, it is not ‘existence’ as a real predicate or adetermination of that subject, but the actual thing which is added to thatsubject concept. Thus, what Kant in fact means by his claim that existencecannot be contained analytically in the mere concept of something is that inan existential proposition the logical predicate ‘exists’ refers to the actualityof the object external to my subject concept, and this actuality obviouslycannot be contained in the former analytically: ‘[T]he object in its actualityis not contained analytically in my concept, but is added synthetically to myconcept’.70 This synthetic addition does not, however, increase or enlargethe content of the concept I have of the object whose actuality is asserted,for the synthesis in an existential proposition is not an addition of a realpredicate or a further determination to the subject. Instead, an actualcorrespondence or match is asserted between the actual object and thesubject concept through which the object is thought as merely possible withexactly the same content. Hence, the identity of the contents thesis. Fromthis point, we can conclude that syntheticity of propositions does notnecessarily require the enlargement of the subject of that proposition in thesense of addition of a real predicate or a new determination, but moreloosely, it requires the addition of something that is not already contained inthe subject.

In the absolute positing of a subject as an actual object, the givenness ofthe object from ‘outside’ of the concept conforms to another more refinedaspect of syntheticity in Kant, that is, its appeal to the givenness and/or theconditions of givenness of objects to our cognition. In his illuminatingaccount of Kant’s notion of syntheticity, Robert Hanna calls this aspect ‘thedetermining factor of syntheticity’ and formulates it as the intuition-dependence of the truth and meaning of synthetic propositions:

A true proposition is synthetic if and only if it is consistently deniable (hencenot logically or conceptually necessary) and its meaning and truth strictlyrequire a connection with an intuition – an empirical intuition in the case ofsynthetic a-posteriori propositions, and a pure intuition in the case of synthetic

a-priori propositions.71

The intuition-dependence of syntheticity, and thus of existential proposi-tions, is where Kant’s account of the notions of existence andabsolute positing is reframed under his critical theory of possible experience.

70Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, 28: 1028. See also Critique, A599/B627.71Robert Hanna, Kant and The Foundations of Analytic Philosophy, 192–3.

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For a sensible intuition, either pure or empirical, is the means through whichalone an object can be immediately given or represented to our mode ofcognition. Empirical intuitions are those which represent the objective/material content of our actual cognition, and pure a priori intuitions arethose which represent the totality of space and time that are, as pure formsof intuition, the formal conditions of the possibility of empirical intuitions.Thus, intuitions, as pure and empirical, constitute the sensible conditions ofthe givenness of objects of our possible empirical experience.

The intuition-dependence of syntheticity and its appeal to the sensibleconditions of possible experience provide us with a new perspective to seethe fundamental difference between relative positing in analytic proposi-tions where the predicate that is already contained in the subject is positedas relative to the subject and absolute positing in synthetic propositionswhere the subject is posited with all its predicates as having an actualobject external to and yet corresponding to it. As strongly emphasizedbefore, in an analytic proposition such as ‘God is omnipotent’, the subjectconcept, in so far as it is free of internal contradiction, does not involvemore than an agnostic notion of possibility, namely, the mere logicalpossibility of what is represented through a concept alone without the leastneed for an appeal to the principles or conditions of possible experience.Not only the question whether God actually exists, but also even thequestion whether He is a possible object of experience, remains. On theother hand, in absolute positing, provided that the proposition is true onthe basis of our empirical intuitions, by positing the subject we qualify itnot only as a possible object of experience, but also as an actual object ofexperience, as part of actuality or our actual world as a whole. Thus, in atrue existential proposition, it is not the content of the posited subjectitself, but the content of our entire actual experience which is enlarged.Kant explains this in one of the richest passages of his account of thenature of existence within the refutation. As was just repeated above,within the mere concept of a thing alone, in a completely a-priori mannerand without an appeal to the conditions of experience, the object can bethought only as logically possible and not as really possible, as a possibleobject of experience. Kant goes one step further and says that even in thecase of an object whose real possibility we know a posteriori, the mereconcept of it, although connected with the conditions of possibleexperience, does not suffice to assert the existence of the object, and thushe draws the thin line between the real possibility and the actuality ofthings:

If the issue were an object of sense, then I could not confuse the existence ofthe thing with the mere concept of the thing. For through its concept, theobject would be thought only as in agreement with the universal conditions of a

possible empirical cognition in general, but through its existence it would bethought as contained in the context of the entirety of experience; thus through

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connection with the content of the entire experience the concept of the object isnot in the least increased, but our thinking receives more through it, namely, apossible perception.72

To understand the depth of this passage and to exhibit more precisely howKant’s twin theses in the refutation are complemented by his criticalprogramme of modality, we have to resort to a section in the Critique called‘The Postulates of Empirical Thought In General’, where Kant givesdefinitions of modal categories with respect to the conditions of possibleexperience, and presents thereby another positive thesis concerningexistence. According to the postulates of possibility, actuality and necessity:

1. Whatever agrees with the formal conditions of experience (inaccordance with intuition and concepts) is possible.

2. That which is connected with the material conditions of experience(sensation) is actual.

3. That whose connection with the actual is determined in accordance withgeneral conditions of experience is (exists) necessarily.73

While the negative and positive theses presented in the refutation were aboutthe predicative function of ‘exists’ in a proposition, i.e., what it means toascribe existence to the subject of a proposition, the postulate of actualityprovides us with a criterion of existence, i.e. to what objects we canlegitimately ascribe existence. First, possibility, actuality and necessity, asthe categories of modality, are limited in their application to the objects ofpossible experience. What belongs to this stock of all possible objects isdetermined by the criterion that is suggested by the postulate of possibility.Accordingly, a possible object of experience is one which conforms to theformal conditions of experience, which is to say that it is one whichconforms to space and time, as the sensible conditions, and to the pureconcepts of the understanding, as the intellectual conditions. However,being an actual object of experience, the postulate of actuality suggests,requires also conformity to the material conditions of experience, that is, theobject must be given through an empirical intuition or perception.

There is one point to be attended to here. One should carefully distinguishan act of cognition from an existential proposition. For an actual cognition totake place, the material content of experience must be received through anactual perception. On the other hand, an existential proposition relies on theempirical knowledge of actual things, and this

does not require] immediate perception of the object itself the existence ofwhich is to be cognized, but still its connection with some actual perception in

72Critique, A601/629.73Ibid., B266.

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accordance with the analogies of experience, which exhibit all real connectionin an experience in general.74

Analogies are thus the inferential instruments that give unity to experience,and by means of them we can legitimately ascribe existence to things that wedo not actually perceive, and include them in the context of our entireexperience. The only question is whether these unperceived things canbe somehow connected with an actual perception of ours. If so, ‘with theguidance of the analogies we can get from our actual perceptions to thething in the series of possible perceptions’.75 This possibility of analogicalinference and the broadened scope of actuality is also what essentiallydistinguishes Kant’s notion of existence from Berkeley’s infamous ‘esse estpercipi’ (to exist is to be perceived). We understand here why Kant says thatby the absolute positing of something, our thinking receives an additional‘possible perception’: to posit something as actual is to posit it either as anobject of actual perception, or as something that can be analogicallyconnected to an actual perception: in the most general terms, to posit it asan object of possible perception.76 It follows that according to Kant’s thirdthesis, to exist is to be connected with an actual perception, eitherimmediately or analogically.

As for the postulate of necessity or necessary existence, one may askwhether it is compatible with Kant’s view that unconditioned necessitycannot be legitimately applied to things, but only to propositions, whichappeared in our account of the refutation as the first step of Kant’s overallargument. Malcolm, for instance, without explaining why, says that thethird postulate rules out the interpretation that Kant holds this view.77

However, the third postulate is wholly compatible with the distinctionbetween the unconditioned necessity of propositions and the conditionednecessity of things, primarily because the necessity whose criterion ischaracterized in the postulate is a conditioned necessity (of the existence ofsomething), conditioned by the universal conditions and laws of experience.The case is not that of the necessity of a single object whose existence can beknown completely a priori, from its mere concept alone and in isolationfrom the context of our experience. Instead, the postulate describes a case in

74Ibid., A225.75Ibid., A226.76From here, Heidegger reaches, rather promptly, the conclusion that ‘the specific character of

absolute position, as Kant defines it, reveals itself as perception;’ Heidegger, Basic Problems, 46.

This conclusion is valid but somehow conceals the fundamental difference between the

foundations of the two positive theses concerning existence that I mentioned above. It is always

useful to keep in mind that Kant’s thesis of absolute positing is essentially about what it means

to say in a proposition that a thing exists. On the other hand, the postulate of actuality is about

the empirical conditions of actuality, in other words, it defines the criteria under which a subject

can be posited absolutely. Therefore, the postulate is a supplementary thesis about what exists

rather than what existence is.77See Norman Malcolm, ‘Anselm’s Ontological Arguments’, n 33.

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which the existence of an object is necessitated by and thus is relative to andconditioned by the previously given existence or actuality of another object.Kant puts it explicitly that this relationship of necessity between theactualities of two objects is that of cause and effect, and that the universallaws of experience by virtue of which we can know that the two actualitiesare necessarily related are laws of causality:

Thus it is not the existence of things (substances) but of their state of whichalone we can cognize the necessity, and moreover only from other states,

which are given in perception, in accordance with empirical laws ofcausality. . . Hence we cognize only the necessity of effects in nature, thecauses of which are given to us . . . [Necessity] does not hold of the existence ofthings, as substances . . . Necessity therefore concerns only the relations of

appearances in accordance with the dynamical law of causality.78

Thus, whereas the necessity of analytic propositions is a logical or formalrelation between the concepts of subject and predicate, the necessity that thethird postulate gives us is a real or material relation between things themselves.In both cases, the necessary existence of things is a conditioned one.

Having seen the aspects from which existential and other modalpropositions can be said to be synthetic, with the help of the postulateswe can now understand the ascriptions of modalities as different ways ofpositing the subject in a proposition. In all three cases, the subject is positedwith all its predicates, namely ‘absolutely’. However, to say that a thing ispossible is to posit it as agreeing with the formal conditions of experience,that is, as a possible object of experience. On the other hand, to say that athing exists is to posit it as an actual object that is either given through oranalogically connected with an actual perception. Lastly, to say that a thingexists necessarily is to posit it as an actual object whose existence isnecessitated by its causal relation with another previously given actualobject.79 None of these synthetic propositions enlarges or further determinesthe content of the subject by adding a new predicate to it, but they posit it indifferent ways with all the predicates that are already contained in it. Asnone of the modal categories is a real predicate, they cannot be introducedinto or already contained in the definition of a thing.

The gist of what I call the critical programme of modality that forms thebackground of Kant’s threefold argument in his refutation is thus based onlimiting the modal categories to empirical employment with their peculiarnon-determining but positing functions.80 In order for his account of

78Critique, B 280.79For Kant’s own reformulation of modalities in terms of positing, see Lectures on Metaphysics,

29: 822 and 28: 554–5.80Whether Kant’s refutation works in itself as an argument in isolation from the critical

framework is a question that is worth to ask here. At the final analysis, the proponent of the

ontological proof may always reject to endorse Kant’s critical philosophy, if the refutation is

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syntheticity to accommodate this peculiarity that is not captured by‘enlargement’ or ‘addition’-based definitions of syntheticity, Allen Woodproposes a quite secure and helpful distinction between two sorts ofsynthetic proposition: ‘(1) Those which ‘‘determine’’ the subject concept or‘‘add to’’ it, by predicating some reality (or negation) of it, and (2) thosewhich ‘‘posit’’ the concept or determinations thought in it.’81 Although it isgenerally unnoticed, Kant himself makes a parallel distinction amongsynthetic propositions. According to him, as modal propositions do notserve to add a determination to the object of the subject concept, they arenot ‘objective-synthetic’. ‘But since they are nevertheless always synthetic,they are so subjectively only’, in the sense that they tell us the way in whichthe subject concept is connected with the cognitive faculties of the subject ofpossible experience.82 Therefore, in a modal proposition, we do not in factmake a statement about an object directly, but only indirectly, through therelation of its concept to our subjective–cognitive make-up.83

University of Pennsylvania

presented as essentially dependent on it. However, as I indicated at the beginning, my concern in

this paper has not been to discuss the validity of neither the proof nor the alleged refutation, but

to investigate Kant’s notion of existence (and modality in general) as presented in the refutation

and to exhibit its integrity with his critical account of modality as a whole.81Allen W. Wood, ‘Kant’s Critique of the Three Theistic Proofs [partial]’ (from Kant’s Rational

Theology) in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Critical Essays, edited by P. Kitcher, 273–4.82See Critique, A234:

The principles of modality are not, however, objective-synthetic, since the predicates

of possibility, actuality, and necessity do not in the least augment the concept of which

they are asserted in such a way as to add something to the representation of the object.

But since they are nevertheless always synthetic, they are so subjectively only, i.e., they

add to the concept of a thing (the real), about which they do not otherwise say

anything, the cognitive power whence it arises and has its seat, so that, if it is merely

connected in the understanding with the formal conditions of experience, its object is

called possible; if it is in connection with perception (sensation, as the matter of the

senses), and through this determined by means of the understanding, then the object is

actual; and if it is determined through the connection of perceptions in accordance

with concepts, then the object is called necessary.

This distinction, I believe, may shed further light not only on the peculiar syntheticity of modal

propositions but also on syntheticity in general. However, in this paper I should be content with

leaving the interpretation of this striking distinction as an open question for another study.83This idea of Kant’s that by asserting that a thing exists, we do not say something about the

thing but its concept, when taken together with his dictum that existence is not a real predicate,

anticipates Frege’s celebrated view that existence is a property not of objects but only of

concepts, and that it is itself a second-level concept. See, for instance, Frege’s ‘On Concept and

Object’, in Translations From the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, edited by Peter Geach

and Max Black (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960).

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