Sunday, May 19, 2019

Anthropocentrism and Superstition

At first glance, Spinoza's doctrine seems theologically orthodox insofar as it entails that everything that occurs in the world is an expression of the will of a deity.  However, the primary heterodox detail is the elimination of any Anthropocentrism, i. e. that an event is specifically addressed to humans, e. g. that a rainbow is a divine message to humans.  Spinoza classifies such Anthropocentrism as 'Inadequate' Ideas, but a less specialized term is 'superstition'.  So, because in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant concludes that it is Rational to believe that Happiness can be a divine reward, the fundamental task of the Critique of Judgment is to restore dignity to a superstitious interpretation of events.  He accomplishes that by introducing the faculty of Reflective Judgment to human intelligence, as the source of the imputation of Purpose to events.  However, he does so without acknowledging that the validation of such Anthropomorphic superstition is contrary to his Copernican Revolution that presumably follows Spinoza in rigorously developing the Epistemological implications of the new epochal Heliocentrism.

No comments:

Post a Comment