VOL. IV (XXI) 2009 - Departamentul de Filosofie si Stiinte ale ...

37 THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPT OF GOD AND “THE NEW EPISTEMOLOGICAL IDEALISM”
a thing existing independently of our own mind, but the
organization of that mind itself … [which, according to
Kant] is not your mind or my mind, but always the mind
in general, of which the so-called individual mind is only
an arbitrary separated fragment. Consequently Kant’s
God is not to be equated with the empirical individual:
you or me … but with mind in general. 12
What also appears as relevant with respect to the context of Kant’s
(clarifying) influence upon Collingwood’s interpretation of religious
experience and its relation with philosophical knowledge—as self-knowledge
of the mind—(that is, the relation between theistic transcendentalism and
philosophical immanentism, or “epistemological idealism”) is the Kantian
analysis of the relation between criticism and metaphysics. As Collingwood
himself put it, all his effort to articulate the old Platonic transcendentalism
with immanentism—as the distinctive sign of the critical and anti-‘realist”
tendencies of modern philosophy—aims to settle the foundation of a new,
and more comprehensive, theology which should reunite the two unilateral
perspectives, thus making them complete each other; for “the real nature of
God is no nearer to transcendence alone than it is to immanence alone.” 13
At this point, a small number of general aspects of Kant’s philosophy
are worth bringing into light, in order to make his influence upon Collingwood
more evident. In order to reach this objective I will briefly follow Viorel
Colţescu’s clarifying interpretation of Kant’s view on metaphysics and its
implications. This perspective holds that the German philosopher has
rejected only the traditional, rationalist-dogmatic, metaphysics; at the same
time, he acknowledged the great merits of its representatives, especially
Leibniz and Wolff. According to Kant, metaphysics as a science of the
supersensible is not possible: Due to its a priori forms, our knowledge is
inevitably confined to phenomena as given in experience 14 without being
able to extend itself to the transphenomenal reality, to the thing-in-itself. But
the thing-in-itself really exists: in this context, Alois Riehl’s inspired sentence
“The Critique of Pure Reason asserts the metaphysical, but denies
metaphysics” 15 can be properly understood.
In other words, the Kantian denial does not regard metaphysics in
general, but a certain type of metaphysics, namely the dogmatic one. This
restriction itself raises the following problem: which is the other type of
metaphysics Kant could have in mind? Certain formulations from the Critique
of Pure Reason seem to indicate that the legitimate metaphysics is a
systematisation of the pure concepts of thought, to which criticism offers only
the main joints and the “leading thread.” 16 Thus, in the Preface to the first
edition, Kant tells us that metaphysics “is nothing but the inventory,
systematically arranged, of all we possess through pure reason” (A XX). As
regards Collingwood, his view seems to me in accordance with this Kantian
idea, especially in his range of works starting with “Reason is Faith