The Ontological Parody: A Reply to Joshua Ernst’s “Charles Hartshorne and the Ontological Argument”

Charles Hartshorne argues that Kant’s criticisms of Anselm’s onto­ logical argument were not directed against its strongest formulation. Kant criticised the argument on the famous grounds that existence is not a predicate (B620–30); however, Hartshorne argued that there is a modal distinction that needs to be made between existing contingently and existing necessarily, and while “existence” per se may not be a real predicate, necessary existence is. In his paper, “Charles Hartshorne and the Ontological Argument,” Joshua Ernst argues that Hartshorne’s revisions of the ontological argument “can withstand Kant’s critique of predicated existence” (Ernst 60), and that Hartshorne’s version of the argument “solved the problems faced by Anselm’s original argument such as those of perfection and infinity” (Ernst 65). In this reply, I argue that there are key problems faced by Anselm’s argu­ ment other than the ones to which Ernst points, and that Hartshorne’s version of the argument is just as vulnerable to these problems. My strategy shall be as follows: After briefly explicating Anselm’s ontological argument, I shall point to two objections that can be levelled against it. These objections take for granted that existence can be predi­ cated of an object (and so the objections come at the argument from a very different angle to those of Kant), but they show that if the argument proves that God exists, then it proves that other things exist too. Thus, the objections proceed by way of parody: Anselm’s ontological argument can be parodied, thus proving the existence of all kinds of things that are likely