Bohme and Kant: at a glance

This is the third essay I have written that compares the philosophy of Immanuel Kant to other thinkers. The first essay compared the philosophies of Kant and Plato. It was an attempt to understand Kant’s Copernican Revolution in relation to the classical metaphysics as expressed in Plato’s “Timaeus”. It focused on the topic of how Kant reversed the function of reason-instead of reason giving access to the real world of the Forms, it only provides knowledge of the world of appearances: the everyday world we live in. For Kant, reason had no transcendent or anagogic function. Reason, to him, could only give knowledge of the phenomenon and not knowledge of the real world (thing in itself).

In the second essay, Kant was compared to St. Bonaventure. Bonaventure was chosen because he is one of the clearest representatives of the neoplatonic tradition. The purpose of the Bonaventre and Kant essay was to relate Kant’s transcendental schema to the metaphysical psychology of the passive and active intellect in the neoplatonic tradition. Kant’s transcendental aesthetic and analytic were found to parallel the neoplatonic division of the passive and active intellects in many ways.

In the present essay, we find a neglected influence on Kant’s philosophy: Jacob Bohme. Why look towards Bohme for any influence on Kant? After all, Kant never mentions Bohme in his works. The rationale for Bohme lies in the fact that Kant grew up in the Pietist faith. Bohme was one of the main inspirations for the Pietist movement, which is also Kant’s fist philosophic influence. It is necessary to make some remarks concerning Pietism, in order to gain some insight into such an inspirational subject. It is believed by Pietists that Martin Luther’s reformation of Christianity had not been completed. Luther had reformed the practice and soteriology of Christianity, but had left the more metaphysical aspects, a.k.a. the Trinity, untouched.  Bohme took up the reformation of the Trinity and the nature of God. This was the very theology that Kant learned as a boy.

To begin with, more explanations of Bohme’s methods must be made sense of, since they are not the familiar methods of academic philosophy. Bohme was first and foremost a mystic and subject to mystic visions, but the key to his method lies in the doctrine of the microcosm and the macrocosm. That which is above is like that which is below, and vice versa. If someone had accused Bohme of being anthropomorphic in his conception of God, it would not be a far reaching cry. He believed humans were made in the image of God. Bohme was not referring to the physical image, but rather the mental image. All the potential we find in people and creation are also in God. Bohme called these potentials “natural properties”.

Bohme’s natural properties will be compared to Kant’s transcendental schema. Bohme’s first three natural properties are contraction, expansion, and rotation. Together, they form the fire wheel. The fire wheel is out of balance and out of harmony. This is heat which is all smoke and bears no light. It is a whirling mass of confusion and chaos. The modern phrase that is parallel to this is the phrase “someone who is spinning their wheels but going nowhere”. This is also analogous to Kant’s thing in itself. Kant hints that the thing in itself can only be accessed through emotion. There are no discriminations in the thing in itself, not even that of space and time. In Bohme the fire wheel is associated with the Father in the Trinity. The Father stands for the creative principle. Kant asserts that logic and the categories cannot give us new knowledge, only observations and experiences can create new knowledge.  For Kant and Bohme the first principle is creative and illogical-whether it be a whirling mass of chaos or the thing in itself.

Bohme’s next ‘wheel’ is the water wheel, or wheel of mildness. It begins with his fourth natural property: lightning. This is illumination; the shock of knowledge. This is the ability to step back from the confusion and make distinctions. This is the way out of the whirling mass of chaos. In Kant’s work, we find the transcendental aesthetic. This is the first discrimination of distinction that the subject makes: that of space and time. In Kantian language, these spatial-temporalized data are the intuitions that will go into the manifold of the categories of the transcendental analytic. The transcendental aesthetic is still in the subjective realm in the works of Kant. There is not yet a discrimination of causation.

The fifth natural property is of light and water. This represents the vanquishing of the fear of the fire wheel. It is the act of making conscious that which was previously unconscious. It is through greater discriminations that people take charge of their world. The water is a product of alchemical language for the discriminated conscious mind. It has been called “the water of the philosophers”. This is the realm of the Forms, or the Son of Trinity. The Son is identified with the mind of God. This stage in Kant’s work corresponds to the transcendental analytic, the categories. In the categories the objective world is created. Emotions are taken out and data is universalized. Leftover is all “dead” mechanistic matter-the hard, cold empirical world of science in action. The transcendental analytic, like the aesthetic, is only in the subject. It is above the thing in itself, but has no effect on the thing in itself. Like Bohme’s water wheel, it covers the fire wheel but allows it in potential.

The sixth natural property is the spoken or audible word. This is known as the Holy Spirit of the Trinity. This is the bending of things together, and the making of the elements into an intelligible whole (creation). This is the distinguishing point, end of the water wheel and the God-head. In Kant’s work, this is the work of the transcendental analytic-the bonding of the intuitions into a coherent whole. This is the act of creating the objective world.

The seventh natural property is known as Kingdom. These are the things that God did not consciously create: his throne, Heaven , God’s appearance, etc. This corresponds to the objective world. The passing and bonding of the intuitions in the subject is not a conscious process for Kant. The objective world is a creation by all subjects, but not created consciously. In short, the Kingdom of Bohme is the objective world of Kant.

Thus we have a tentative attempt at observing the influence of Bohme’s pietism on the ideas of Kant, a subject which deserves further work and investigation.