Kant's non-cognitive argument based on practical reason claims that moral considerations alone suffice to justify the idea of personal immortality as a postulate. Some recent objections are considered here that have charged him with overstepping his own distinction between phenomenon and noumenon. After examining the arguments, I exonerate Kant of having violated his own principles.
More troubling, however, is the peculiarity involved in postulating an infinite progression toward a goal whose attainment, by hypothesis, would undermine the very foundations of morality (which for Kant always requires the agonistic condition of struggling to improve one's lower nature). I argue that this paradox necessitates a reexamination of some tacit cultural presuppositions underlying Kant's conception of the soul.
Finally, I examine the thought of Kitaro Nishida, whose Zen Buddhist-inspired dialectic of the basho (logical “place”) provides an alternative perspective from which to reconsider the postulate of immortality. Nishida, like Kant, rigorously maintains the phenomenon-noumenon distinction, yet his examination of ethics leads him to postulate an eventual sublation of the “soul” principle. I conclude that Kant's postulate of immortality, while plausible enough on its own terms, is limited by a Western cultural bias and therefore fails in the end to be compelling.
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