WITHIN philosophy, there is a perennial debate between those who base their worldview on the basis of a priori (from the earlier) and those who prefer to side with a posteriori (from the later). Ordinarily, the former category includes varieties of thought that are centred on deductive reason, especially where disciples such as mathematics are concerned. Defenders of the second category, a posteriori, insist that something can only be established on the basis of empirical knowledge.

This latter view, of course, is found chiefly among scientists. Contrary to the empiricist standpoint, Otto notes that the

rational ideas of absoluteness, completion, necessity, and substantiality, and no less so those of the good as an objective value, objectively binding and valid, are not to be ‘evolved’ from any sort of sense-perception. And the notions of ‘epigenesis’, ‘heterogony’, or whatever other expression we may choose to denote our compromise and perplexity, only serve to conceal the problem, the tendency to take refuge in a Greek terminology being here, as so often, nothing but an avowal of one’s own insufficiency. Rather, seeking to account for the ideas in question, we are referred away from all sense-experience back to an original and underivable capacity of the mind implanted in the ‘pure reason’ independently of all perception. (p.112)

It is here, especially, that one unearths the deep influence of the post-Kantian philosophy that Otto has inherited from Jakob Fries. Naturally, the average devotee of the a posteriori school of thought is hardly likely to sympathise with Otto’s forays into the non-rational and he goes one step further than the “pure reason” one finds in Kant by alluding to what the mystics call the “ground of the soul” (Seelengrund). This untarnished basis for the origins of the non-rational, free from the experiential demands of scientism, is nonetheless consistent with Kant’s own philosophy as it appears in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781).

Whilst Kant’s work made a point of stating that all knowledge begins with experience, through the effects that objects have on our senses, he was adamant that in no way can experience account for everything and that a distinction must be made between the impressions we receive and the cognition derived from ourselves. Although sense-impressions can enable us to arrive at such knowledge, therefore, Otto insists that in the case of the numinous such knowledge arises from the innermost recesses of the soul. Sensory data, he tells us, is merely the means by which such information is obtained and is thus

the incitement, the stimulus, and the ‘occasion’ for the numinous experience to become astir, and, in so doing, to begin—at first with a naive immediacy of reaction—to be interfused and interwoven with the present world of sensuous experience, until, becoming gradually purer, it disengages itself from this and takes its stand in absolute contrast to it. The proof that in the numinous we have to deal with purely a priori cognitive elements is to be reached by introspection and a critical examination of reason such as Kant instituted. (p.113)

That imparted by the numinous is quite different to the knowledge we extract from the senses, not least as a result of its transcendent nature. Our senses cannot possibly account for something as non-rational as the supernatural, particularly when the epistemological origins of the latter are completely independent of the senses themselves. The form of “pure reason” advanced by Otto, centred on the a priori “ground of the soul,” even surpasses the practical and theoretical ideas of Kant himself.

In response to the claim made by scientists that religion offers no response to the empiricist method, Otto retorts that it is they who cannot account for religion because “out of nothing nothing can be explained”. After all, empiricists can hardly base their findings on data when no such data exists:

Nature can only be explained by an investigation into the ultimate fundamental forces of nature and their laws: it is meaningless to propose to go farther and explain these laws themselves, for in terms of what are they to be explained? But in the domain of spirit the corresponding principle from which an explanation is derived is just the spirit itself, the reasonable spirit of man, with its predispositions, capacities, and its own inherent laws. This has to be presupposed: it cannot itself be explained. (p.114)

By “predispositions,” Otto is referring to man’s primordial capacity to develop towards a state of mental and spiritual maturity. This fundamental longing, as far as he is concerned, is a decidedly religious impulse which provides the seeker with his or her means for spiritual fulfilment. More crucially, at least for the purposes of this particular stage in our examination of Otto’s ideas, is the fact that predisposition is a vindication of a priori.