Herman Bavinck’s Metaphysics of Knowledge. BB002
Knowledge beyond the Immanuel Kant’s Bounds of Pure Reason
“Pure reason” refers to Immanuel Kant’s idea of the faculty of reason operating independently and applying a priori concepts or innate forms and categories of thought to impose order to makes sense of sensations received from the world. Effectively, the mind becomes the measure and bounds of all knowledge. But we can never be sure if there is correspondence between the structured experience in mind and reality outside the mind. Kant’s conclusion is that there is an unbridgeable gap between what the mind perceives with its constructed concepts and representations (phenomena) and the world or the things-in-themselves (noumena).
Herman Bavinck agrees with Kant that the mind plays a determinative role for all meaningful experience but Bavinck argues that Kant’s epistemological dualism undermines knowledge altogether. “For, says idealism [Kant], if a thing and the representation of a thing are two different realities, then we must despair of knowledge of the thing. Since we simply can never test our representation of a thing by the thing itself, we can never step outside of ourselves, of our representational world…We always remain inside the circle of our representations and never come into contact with the thing itself, only with our representation of the thing. Stated differently, only that which is conscious exists for us; I can only think the thought, not the thing itself. That which is not my thought is inconceivable, unknowable to me; it does not exist for me.” [RD 1.216]
Contrary to Kant, any viable epistemology must maintain the mind’s ability to go beyond appearances to grasp reality as it truly is, not merely as it must appear to us, given our cognitive structures. Bavinck argues that both sensations and the mind complement one another in the construction of knowledge, though in a different manner than what Kant envisages. On the one hand, Bavinck writes, “We do not create the truth, and we do not spin it out of our brain; but, in order to find it, we must go back to the facts, to reality, to the [empirical] sources.” [PR 68] On the other hand, the mind uses the received particular sensations to grasp what sensation points to, that is, essence and universals. “All science rests on the assumption that reality is not coextensive with the phenomena but contains a kernel of divine wisdom, being the realization of the decree of God – insofar as the truth is bound to reality and finds its criterion in correspondence with reality. But the truth transcends the empirical reality, because and in the same degree that scientific investigation descends more deeply and penetrates more fully into its essence. And the truth thus found by science is adapted to consciousness, as it can be discovered and received by consciousness alone.” [PR 68]
Bavinck stresses that the mind is not imposing an arbitrary order to chaotic experience, but is discerning and conforming to an order that is already present in reality. Hence, genuine knowledge requires a reversal of the Kantian paradigm which makes the knowing subject central to the constitution of the phenomenal world. Rather than making objects conform to our mentally constructed knowledge, Bavinck insists that our knowledge is designed to conform to objects. He writes, “The intellect is bound to the body and thus to the cosmos and therefore cannot become active except by and on the basis of the senses. From the outset the intellect is pure potentiality, a blank page (tabula rasa) without any content, and is only activated, aroused to actuality, by the sensible world. The primary impetus therefore comes from the sensible world; it impinges upon the human mind, arouses it, urges it to action. But the moment the intellect is activated, it immediately and spontaneously works in its own way and according to its own nature. And the nature of the intellect is that it has the power (vis), ability (facultas), inclination (inclinatio), and fitness (aptitudo) to form certain basic concepts and principles. It does this by means of perception that is immediate, automatic, involuntary, and without any strain, previous effort, or exercise of reasoning power (sine ratiocinatione). Since these concepts that are certain are a priori and precede all reasoning and proof, they deserve to be called eternal truths (veritates alternae). Thus, the moment the intellect itself proceeds to act, it automatically knows itself bound to the laws of thought.” [RD.1. 225]
Knowledge as given and constructed
Bavinck’s epistemology skilfully navigates between two extremes: a naïve empiricism that sees knowledge as simply “reading off” reality and a constructivism that sees knowledge as purely an intellectual construct. Instead, he develops what we might call a “critical correspondence” theory. Knowledge, in Bavinck’s view, involves both receptivity and activity. The mind does not passively receive experiential data but actively organizes and interprets experience according to its inherent categories. Yet these categories aren’t arbitrary human constructions – they correspond to real structures in the world itself. Our concepts of causality, substance, relation, and quality reflect actual features of reality. This audacious claim offers a direct challenge to the various forms of nominalism and conceptualism that were already influential in Bavinck’s time and have become even more dominant in contemporary philosophy. Precisely because the forms of cognitive structures of the mind are actually present in reality itself, our categories of thought do not distort but enable access to reality. As such, our cognitive faculties, while limited, are genuinely capable of grasping reality as it truly is, though always partially and from a particular perspective. Bavinck is not advocating for a simple return to pre-Kantian naïveté. He incorporates Kant’s insights about the active role of the knower while relocating this activity within a different metaphysical framework which acknowledges the constructive dimension of human knowledge while maintaining its genuine correspondence to reality.
The divine Logos and unity of knowledge
The cornerstone of Bavinck’s alternative to Kantian bounds of pure reason is his doctrine of the Logos. Against Kant’s unbridgeable gap between phenomena and noumena, Bavinck proposes the Logos to be the metaphysical bridge that spans this divide. Bavinck writes, “All cognition consists in a peculiar relation of subject and object and is built on the agreement of these two. The reliability of perception and thought is not assured unless the forms of thought and the forms of being correspond, in virtue of their origin in the same creative wisdom.” [PR 66] Unlike Descartes, who requires God as a guarantor to bridge an already-established gap between mind and world, Bavinck begins with the assumption that mind and world are designed to correspond to each other.
Our categories of understanding are not merely subjective forms imposed on an alien reality but reflect – albeit partially the very rationality embedded in creation itself. In short, our knowledge is not restricted to mere appearances because appearances themselves are genuine manifestations of reality. It is the same Logos who created both the reality outside of us and the laws of thought within us and who produced an organic connection and correspondence between the two. This shared origin creates what Bavinck calls a “pre-established harmony” between thought and being. The gap between appearances and things-in-themselves isn’t absolute but relative. The forms and categories through which we know the world aren’t barriers to knowing reality but the very means by which reality becomes accessible to finite minds.
Bavinck writes, “There just has to be correspondence or kinship between object and subject. The Logos who shines in the world must also let his light shine in our consciousness. That is the light of reason, the intellect, which, itself originating in the Logos, discovers and recognizes the Logos in things. It is the internal foundation of knowledge (principium cognoscendi internum).” [RD 1:233] The principle allows Bavinck to explain why mathematics works so well in describing physical reality and we can apply logical principles to describe the world outside our minds. Bavinck emphasizes, “But that conviction can, therefore, rest only in the belief that it is the same Logos who created both the reality outside of us and the laws of thought within us and who produced an organic connection and correspondence between the two. Only in this way is science possible, i.e., knowledge not only of the changing appearances but of the universal, the logical connections inherent in things.” [RD 1.231]
Knowledge as recognition rather than constitution
Bavinck agrees with Kant that the mind applies categories of thought to structure human knowledge but he disagrees with Kant in the understanding of the mind’s activity in knowing. For Kant, the mind constitutes the phenomenal world through its imposition of forms and categories on a merely given manifold of sensations. The structure of experience and thought comes entirely from the side of the mind. In contrast, for Bavinck, the structures of experience is not only a construct of the mind, as is discerned as already present in reality. [RD 1.225] The shift of the mind’s activity from constitution of knowledge to recognition of reality fundamentally alters the relationship between mind and world. For Kant, the knowing subject (mind) determines the structures of the knowable world, but for Bavinck, the Logos who structured creation also structured our minds to perceive it. The rational principles according to which we think are the same principles according to which the world was created and structured. Consequently, the structures of reality and the structures of mind mutually correspond because of their common origin in divine wisdom. Knowledge of truth and reality is not merely a construct of the mind, but is divinely grounded.
Bavinck’s exemplified realism
Bavinck metaphysics of knowledge is influence by Augustine’s doctrine of exemplarism which teaches created reality to be a finite exemplification of eternally divine ideas. Augustine wrote that created things participate in and reflect eternal archetypes or ideas in the mind of God. All human knowledge is the re-thinking of God’s thoughts. All cognition of truth is essentially a witness to the divine ideas that comes from the Logos. [RD 1:587] Universals are not arbitrary mental constructs but are realities grounded ultimately in divine thought. The mind does not invent the truth; it acknowledges the truth and reproduces or exemplifies the truth that comes from the Logos. It is the Logos or divine wisdom which ensures correspondence between mind and reality (realism). Indeed, the Christian teaching that God created both the world and consciousness that unites all truth organically and provides an adequate basis for a coherent worldview. Bavinck writes, “Augustine went back behind thought to the essence of the soul, and found in it not a simple unity but a marvelously rich totality; he found there the ideas, the norms, the laws of the true and the good, the solution of the problem of the certainty of knowledge, of the cause of all things, of the supreme good; he found there the seeds and germs of all knowledge and science and art.” [PR 55].
Bavinck elaborates, “It is the same divine wisdom that created the world organically into a connected whole and plants in us the urge for a unified [einheitliche] worldview. If this is possible, it can only be explained only on the basis of the claim that the world is an organism and has first been thought of as such. Only then do philosophy and worldview have a right and ground of existence, as it is also one this high point of knowledge that subject and object harmonize, as the reason within us corresponds to with the principia of all being and knowing…It is the same divine wisdom that gives things existence and our thought objective validity, that bestows intelligibility to things and the power of thinking [denkkracht] to our mind, that makes the things real and our thoughts [denkbeelden] true. The intelligibility of things is the content of our intellect. Both, being and knowing [het zijn en het kennen], have their “reason” [ratio] in the Word, through whom God created all things [CW 51-52].” Such is the foundation for a unified world-and-life view.
Bavinck concludes rhetorically, “What is the relation between thinking and being, between being and becoming, and between becoming and acting? What am I? What is the world, and what is my place and task within this world? Autonomous thinking finds no satisfactory answer to these questions – it oscillates between materialism and spiritualism, between atomism and dynamism, between nomism and antinomianism. But Christianity preserves the harmony [between them] and reveals to us a wisdom that reconciles the human being with God and, through this, with itself, with the world, and with life.” [CW29].
Bavinck’s metaphysics of knowledge seeks to ground unity between the subject and object of knowledge; his idea of an organically created world ensures that there is harmony between being and thinking, being and becoming, and being and acting. However, Bavinck does not proceed to explain how the mind’s (or reason) participation in the divine light arrives at knowledge and understanding. What is missing is a robust theory of cognition and judgment to undergird his metaphysics of knowledge. This lacuna gives the impression of Bavinck’s realism is dogmatically asserted rather than demonstrated. Bavinck could have filled the lacuna since his epistemology shares affinities with Thomas Aquinas (13th C) and Thomas Reid (18th C).1Aquinas, Reid and Bavinck are advocates of realism which teaches that there is correspondence between our perception and reality. Reid advocates direct realism by arguing that we directly perceive external objects, not just mental representations of them. Sensations triggers our awareness and perceptual belief. For Aquinas the active intellect interprets sensory data by abstracting universal concepts from individual sensory experience. Bavinck assumes direct access but acknowledges a distinction between mental representations and external reality. But he relies on a theological argument to overcome the Kantian limits to epistemology by suggesting that God’s design in creation provides an organic connection between the knower and the known. Mental representations are not merely subjective impressions but a mode of participation in a divinely ordered cosmos which ensures a correspondence between our perception and reality. See Arvin Vos, “Knowledge According to Bavinck and Aquinas”, Part 1 Bavinck Review (2015), pp. 9-36 and Part 2 Bavinck Review (2016), pp. 8-62) and Nathaniel Sutanto, “Bavinck Reid on Perception and Knowing God,” Harvard Theological Review (2018), pp. 115-134. The lacuna remains since Bavinck is writing as a theologian who is more focused on grounding knowledge on divine revelation than on metaphysical theory. He proceeds to clarify the nature of human knowledge in the light of divine revelation. This will be the subject of the next post on “Archetypal and Ectypal Knowledge in Herman Bavinck.”
References to books by Herman Bavinck
CW: Christian Worldview (Crossway, 2019).
PR: Philosophy of Revelation (Hendrickson, 2018).
RD: Reformed Dogmatics. 4 vol. set (Eerdmans, 2018).
Next Posts: Archetypal and Ectypal Knowledge in Herman Bavinck.”