The question of the origin of the concept of God is then crucial for any account of how true – and perhaps even truth-evaluable – judgments about God can be made. To attribute the origin of the content to idiosyncratic acts of an individual subject’s cognition would be to denigrate the content of that concept. While Descartes’s solution involves positing an innate status for the concept, Kant’s response is that the only way to secure the non-arbitrariness of the concept’s content is to assign it an origin in the representational capacities of the subject, not as an innate idea but as a natural product of our rational cognitive functions. Kant’s approach involves finding an appropriate middle status for the origin of the idea of God. The idea cannot be generated in the same way that the categories are formed, i.e. in the particular context of the possible experience of spatiotemporal particulars. Moreover, the idea is not of a general rule, but is rather that of a particular thing, which Kant calls the “original image” or archetype [Urbild] (A569/B597). It also cannot be that the idea emerges as a merely arbitrarily formed concept, a hodgepodge of conceptual contents that reflect more the particular expressive capacities of the individual agent than the object itself. Kant warns against trying to express the notion of the archetype through any kind of example: the example will always sully the notion and repeated failed attempts might “render even what is good in the idea suspect by making it similar to a mere fiction”. Kant’s worry that the idea must be distinguishable from mere “creatures of the imagination” is similarly reminiscent of Cartesian complaints (A570/B598). In the Lectures on Philosophical Doctrine of Religion Kant expresses the more general worry that “we will have to take the materials for the concept of God from empirical principles and empirical knowledge.” This risks that one might be picking “bad predicates” and
Kant to locate the content as removed from our possible experience of objects though not so removed as to render it an arbitrary or dispensable product of rationality. He introduces the notion of an ideal in section one of chapter three by appealing to the idea of something being represented in concreto. Something is represented in concreto when it is represented by appeal to a particular instance of the thing (see A713/B741; also A241–2 – note, A711/B739). The categories can represent something in concreto, Kant claims, when they have sensible appearances as their “proper material.” This is to transform them into “concepts of experience.” They do not contain within themselves the conditions of their own application to things and to that extent they represent “no objects at all.” However, ideas of reason are “still more remote from objective reality” since these concepts cannot be even possibly satisfied by the presentation of a particular object, as “no appearances can be found in which they may be represented in concreto” (A567/B595). These aspects of Kant’s model of cognition risk presenting the ideal as an “empty” concept, i.e. as one lacking any possible object as a referent (A51/B75, A62/B87, A77/B103, A155-6/B194-5). However, Kant introduces the notion of the ideal which is “the idea not merely in concreto but in individuo, i.e., as an individual thing which is determinable, or even determined, through the idea alone” (A568/B596). Although sensibility allows particular things to be given, and although reason is the capacity farthest removed from sensibility, the ideal nevertheless is the notion of a particular thing. More specifically, the ideal is the notion of a particular thing that is somehow given in the idea itself. This is the connotation of something being an idea in individuo, whereby the metaphysical gap between a representation and its object is occluded, and the idea itself somehow provides its own exemplification.