Rahner’s Transcendental Deduction of the Vorgriff

RAHNER'S TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION OF THE VORGRIFF WINFRED GEORGE PHILLIPS Trinity University San Antonio, Texas A ORDING TO THE theologian Karl Rahner a necessary condition of the possibility of empirical knowledge is the knowing subject's possession of an a priori V orgrijf , or " pre-apprehension," of God. This V orgriff is taken by Rahner to be more than a mere affirmation of the reality of God, for it is thought of as an actual apprehending or knowing of God by the subject. If Rahner establishes that there is a Vorgriff of God and that it is this kind of apprehension, then he has also established that God exists, and so the argument Rahner provides for the V orgriff can also be interpreted as an argument purporting to establish the reality of God. The essentials of Rahner's argument can be found by examining both his doctoral dissertation on the metaphysics of knowledge of Aquinas, published in German as Geist im Welt and in English as Spirit in the World, and his later work H orer des W ortes (Hearers of the Word). The approach Rahner uses in these works to establish the existence of the V orgriff, and hence of the reality of God, can be characterized as transcendental. If Rahner 's argument is successful, his transcendental approach will thus demonstrate what Kant thought a transcendental approach could not theoretically demonstrate: the reality of God. In this paper I offer a reconstruction of Rahner's argument and compare certain features of it with the approach of Kant. I then suggest a reason for thinking that Rahner's argument cannot succeed in establishing the reality of God in the sense Rahner intends. Rahner's argument focuses on the nature of judgment. Rah257 258 WINFRED GEORGE PHILLIPS ner assumes that we have empirical knowledge of the world, and so, expressing the argument in the first person, one might take as the first premise: (1) I make judgments (I have knowledge) about empirical objects. Rahner's complicated discussion of judgment is presented in terms of Aquinas's doctrines of sensibility and abstraction. Knowledge is characterized as the self-presence of being, and so the knower is also the being of the other that is known: this selfpresence as being-with-another is called "sensibility." 1 Rahner notes that Aquinas sometimes speaks of sensibility in terms of the imagination. He thinks that what Aquinas refers to as the common sense, the imagination, and the memory are so intimately bound together that they could all be contrasted with the external senses as a single sense-totality, and Rahner would prefer to call this totality the "imagination." This totality forms the origin and permanent ground of the external senses, and Aquinas calls the act of the imagination as the source of sensibility the "phantasm." 2 The liberation of the subject from the other is referred to as " thought " or " abstraction." When human existence asks about being in its totality, and thereby places itself as the inquirer in sharp relief against the world, it "objectifies" the other, and this capacity to objectify and make the knower a subject for the first time is called " thought." Thus Rahner claims that it is through thought that human experience of an objective world first becomes possible. Now in the Thomistic metaphysics of knowledge, abstraction is the formation of a universal concept, and the universal concept is the predicate of a possible judgment.3 Judgment s Ibid., 119-123. is the relating of the universal in the predicate to the universal in the subject, and I see this as Rahner's second premise: (2) Judgment involves the awareness of universals in the subject and predicate. 1 Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World, trans. William Dych (London: Sheed & Ward, 1968), 74, 78-80. 2 Ibid., 107. RAHNER'S DEDUCTION OF THE VORGRIFF 259 But the universals in the subject and predicate of a judgment are already "concretized," that is, thought of as related to a possible subject. In fact, before the universal concept of the predicate can even be ascribed to the subject it must be concretized. And even the subject is understood as a concretized universal rather than, for example, as...