Bavinck Briefs BB

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] Continue reading “Herman Bavinck’s Metaphysics of Knowledge. BB002”

Notes and Reflection on Herman Bavinck, Christian Worldview. Chapter 1. Thinking and Being.

A. Critique of empiricism and rationalism and the Kantian impasse. Empiricism which accepts sense perceptions as the only source of knowledge ends up with subjective representations or mental ideas disconnected from reality. Fluctuating and unstable sensations cannot allow us to see the essence of things.

“For as long as the human being has occupied himself with this problem, he almost always ends up on one side or another, either sacrificing knowledge to being or being to knowledge. Empiricism trusts only sensible perceptions and believes that the processing of elementary perceptions into representations and concepts, into judgments and decisions, removes us further and further from reality and gives us only ideas [denkbeelden] that, though clean and subjectively indispensable, are merely “nominal” [nomina] and so are subjective representations, nothing but “the breath of a voice” [flatus vocis], bearing no sounds, only merely a “concept of the mind” [conceptus mentis]. Conversely, rationalism judges that sensible perceptions provide us with no true knowledge; they bring merely cursory and unstable phenomena into view, while not allowing us to see the essence of the things. Real, essential knowledge thus does not come out of sensible perceptions but comes forth from the thinking of the person’s own mind; through self-reflection we learn the essence of things, the existence of the world.”

However, rationalism which argues that knowledge is attained by reflecting on the ideas of the mind fails to deliver its promise. Contrary to its claim (Descartes), the ideas of the mind are far from being clear and distinct and are basically circular or self-referential.

“No law of cause and effect can release the one who accepts the principle and starting point of idealism from the Circassian Circle [toovercirkel] of his representations: out of one representation he can only deduce another, and he is never able to bridge the chasm between thinking and being by reasoning.” Continue reading “Herman Bavinck: Bridging the Dichotomy between Thinking and Being, and Breaching Kant’s Epistemological Firewall between the Phenomenal and Noumenal. BB001”