In the town of Koninsberg in what was called Prussia,there once lived a man called Immanuel Kant. His name is associated with reverence for intellectual achievement and with a dedication to his goals that has come to almost legendary. It is rumoured, for example, that people used to set their clocks by his movement to and from home. Others dispute that and argue that he was a great lover of company. Another view sates that he was a quintessential bachelor who had a low opinion of women and did not marry and so always dined out in an inn, where when he became famous crowds would congregate in the hope of being bale to talk to him.
This claim of worshipful adoration is particularly striking in relation to repeated assertions about his writings that he is one of the most difficult to read of philosophers. This difficulty is understood to emerge not only from the sophistication of his ideas but from his idiosyncrasies in expressing them. He is reputed to favour long sentences, with sentences embedded inside other sentences. he is also described as tediously repeating the same ideas only to sneak in some new perspective when the reader does not expect it.
Like other German philosophers of the eighteenth ton nineteenth centuries, such as Hegel and Schopenhauer portraits of him show him as figure far removed in his style of dress from what we are accustomed to now. The images often suggest a dry minded character who requires great fortitude to read. His image looks less dry than that of Hegel, though. But one of the challenges of this piece of writing is to show that the images of him as difficult and forbidding, remote in relationship to the living, breathing,palpitating concerns of the average human beings who would need to enter into a rarefied world of concentration and perhaps even of technical philosophical knowledge to understand him, is not completely true. An encounter with Hegel could be even ore suprising along thses lines.Reading the introduction to one of his most famous works,The Phenomenology of Mind is almost shocking in its sweet/limpid clarity in contrast to the craggy edifices of thought that on seems to have bee led to expect. But our interest/focus here is/on Kant.Kant is described as the quintessence of thoroughgoing rationalism, where the absolute focus is on what can be reasoned through in consecutive steps that can be examined impartially by any interested party. But that assertion disguises profound springs in his thinking which even though are relevant for his emphasis on rationality, would seem to provide springs of motivation that are deeply emotional, imaginative and from these non-rational sources derive much, if not the essence, of the compelling power of his characteristic style of thinking and expression.
My first encounter with this way of looking at Kant emerged when I read an extract on the Sublime from his Critique of Judgement which led to an experience which I later understood to be trance. Trance is associated with non-rational mental experience not with the rationality identified with Kant. But as the occultist Aleister Crowley points out, it also emerges in abstract thinking. Not surprising, when trance occurs when one loses consciousness of one’s physical surroundings and deep concentration on any subject can certainly induce that. The impact of the extract from Kant was so powerful that I lost consciousness of my environment, the upper floor of the library of the University of Benin in Nigeria where I was completing a BA in 1989.When I came to myself, the sense of difference between the world of ideas to which I had travelled with the aid of the great German master and my mundane surroundings, with other readers poring quietly over their books in the slid unremarkable walls of the library, was so strong that had to ask myself "Am I occupying the same space as these people? I Later now t think /reason that Perhaps I was and yet was not. We were in the same physical space, but not in the same metal space. But to what degree are we ever in the same meta space as others? Our minds are different, our personalities s different but they are sufficiently alike for us to safely occupy the same societies and to a lesser degree, the same planet.
Questions like this about how we perceive space, time, as the time when I lost consciousness of time under the spell of the philosophers words/ideas, can that time be measured, if so, according to what criteria-an external one of the time between when I entered into it and when I came out of it and looked around me or an internal one of how I felt within that state, a sate in which I was not aware of time?-questions about how our minds experience space and time and what these experiences demonstrate about the nature of our minds is central to Kant’s thinking. For years after that experience, I could not recollect the details of what had so powerfully affected me in Kant’s words’ later had to conclude that the ideas were to some degree transgressive of the boundaries of my won conceptual world, the world of ideas that constituted my own mind so that I could not retain them after only one encounter, though a powerful one. I could only do that later through repeated reading. They were close enough though to the already established contents of my mind, though, that they could touch it powerfully.
Writers about poetry and religion make assertions similar to these I am making about my first encounter with Kant’s words. T.S. Eliot sates that he was deeply moved by some passages in Dante’s rarefied but powerfully concrete and sublime Paradiso even though he did not understand them. S.G.F Brandon, writing about the Buddha, argues that great religious reformers are both sufficiently in advance of their environment to be understood to be communicating something compellingly new but not so far removed from the world of ideas and social arrangements of their environment that their ideas could not be appreciated by people in those societies and eventually assimilated to them. These two accounts demonstrate some relationship with my experience with Kant. It was an encounter with novel ideas and expressions but intelligible enough partially intelligible to evoke a powerful response.
My second edxprience with Kant was again at the same library. This time with a quotation from him in A.W Moore’s book on The Infinite. It began with a powerfully resonant statement which is engraved on Kant’s tombstone:"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and the more steadily they are reflected upon: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me". Kant then goes on to relate his own self to the majestic motions of the celestial bodies, the sense of profound space they evoke, the idea of revolution through vast cycles of time they depict, "annihilates" his own importance as an animal creature who must give back to the earth the materials from which it has been made, having been briefly imbued with life, we know not how.The sense of mystery is resonant here in his sense of wonder and possibly gratitude at his and by implication every living being, being imbued with life through an unknown process. Not unknown in terms of its biological constitution, Kant was well informed about contemporary scientific developments and would have been informed about that, at least as much available or was known to Europe of his time, since he had first been a scholar of science before a philosopher. He is likely to have been alluding to the fact that the processes that lead to and sustain life are well known but its essential character remains unknown. Hence the mystery. Reinhold Messner, the legendary mountaineer who is the first person to climb Everest alone and without oxygen (vital to protect against oxygen thinness and subsequent brain malfunctioning at extremely high altitudes) and with minimal climbing equipment, wrote about the need to climb mountains in a manner that suggests leaving something untouched in the triumphant ascent. Something that suggests that the ascent of the mountain does not imply conquest of a wonder of nature but a journey/pilgrimage of appreciation of something that in its totality will always be beyond the human. He suggests therefore that his minimalist philosophy of climbing resents/suggests a sense /an attitude of recognition that within or i relation to the “Great White Walls” as he calls them,, there is something that he has not surmounted, something that must be reverenced through avoiding defacing the mountain through the use of/suing certain kinds of climbing equipment, through encountering, on his own, the solitude of the “Great White Walls”.
sense of worlds of possibility, vistas of being that transcend what the explorer in body and mind, as with Messner, or in thought as with Kant have explored/surveyed, emerges in the works of some of the greatest achievers. Newton writes mysteriously of not knowing how he seemed to others but that to himself he seemed/was like a child picking pebbles by the seashore, amusing himself from time to time by finding a particularly amusing pebble while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before him. Another person who uses a similar metaphor of the sea in relation to mysteries of knowledge is St.Augustine of Hippo. But Augustine was first and last a religious man and a mystic along with being a philosopher while these other writers were deeply interested in religion but were consummate rationalists. What is going on? What have they sensed or dimly perceived in the peaks/of thought they have climbed? Newton’s assertions are particularly striking in the light of the fact that he was not known for his modesty and is not understood to have been insensitive to the scope of is achievements although I wonder if he foresaw the scope of his applications in later centuries, an in the use of his principles of motion in the space exploration
Perhaps the relationships between the achievements of these thinkers and their expression of what Kant describes as a power of intelligence as demonstrated in his moral judgement which enables him to transcend the limitations of his material existence and reach into the infinite may be explained ion terms of a confidence in human cognitive powers in general and ratiocinative powers in particular arrived by years of exercising them continually beyond conventional limits that one achieves what Dion Fortune, who, with Crowley is one of the 20th century’s most famous occultists, described as seeing “beyond the skyline where the strange roads go down”.
Newton’s legacy though, is more complex than the rationalism in relation to which he is often described as one of the key figures of the Scientific Revolution. Its in the latter half of the twentieth century, in the work of Richard Westfall(Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton ;The Life of Isaac Newton,;research summarised in “Isaac Newton” in Encyclopaedia Brottanica 1992) Joe Tether-Dobbs(The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy) among others, and in the resulting online projects of the Newton Project and that the full scope of his kaleidoscopic genius as an inheritor of the religiously inspired and at times esoteric natural philosophy that stretches from Pythagoras to Kepler and perhaps to modern scientists like Paul Davies (The Mind of God) is being excavated and fleshed out.
Kant’s work at times demonstrates a poetic sensitivity which gives a sense of full blooded passion to his writing. As when he describes in his preface to the first edition (1781) of The Critique of Pure Reason, the conflicts between rival philosophical schools in the “arena of these endless contests [which] is called Metaphysics”. Nomadic groups, representing the thoroughgoing philosophical sceptics, who, in the field of thought as nomads in physical space, “hate a permanent habitation and settled mode of living”, wage raids on those who try to erect settled edifices, which, latter, in philosophical thought, will enable the direction of the mind along clearly defined lines shaped by establishing what is certain as a stepping stone to moving forward to examine what is uncertain.
Kant’s work is often dry and logically dogged, taking concentrated patience to follow, but even at those points, following his arguments enables an insight into the power of his mind that resembles peering at the hidden machinery of a high powered vehicle as it engages and shifts gears at top speed.
This claim of worshipful adoration is particularly striking in relation to repeated assertions about his writings that he is one of the most difficult to read of philosophers. This difficulty is understood to emerge not only from the sophistication of his ideas but from his idiosyncrasies in expressing them. He is reputed to favour long sentences, with sentences embedded inside other sentences. he is also described as tediously repeating the same ideas only to sneak in some new perspective when the reader does not expect it.
Like other German philosophers of the eighteenth ton nineteenth centuries, such as Hegel and Schopenhauer portraits of him show him as figure far removed in his style of dress from what we are accustomed to now. The images often suggest a dry minded character who requires great fortitude to read. His image looks less dry than that of Hegel, though. But one of the challenges of this piece of writing is to show that the images of him as difficult and forbidding, remote in relationship to the living, breathing,palpitating concerns of the average human beings who would need to enter into a rarefied world of concentration and perhaps even of technical philosophical knowledge to understand him, is not completely true. An encounter with Hegel could be even ore suprising along thses lines.Reading the introduction to one of his most famous works,The Phenomenology of Mind is almost shocking in its sweet/limpid clarity in contrast to the craggy edifices of thought that on seems to have bee led to expect. But our interest/focus here is/on Kant.Kant is described as the quintessence of thoroughgoing rationalism, where the absolute focus is on what can be reasoned through in consecutive steps that can be examined impartially by any interested party. But that assertion disguises profound springs in his thinking which even though are relevant for his emphasis on rationality, would seem to provide springs of motivation that are deeply emotional, imaginative and from these non-rational sources derive much, if not the essence, of the compelling power of his characteristic style of thinking and expression.
My first encounter with this way of looking at Kant emerged when I read an extract on the Sublime from his Critique of Judgement which led to an experience which I later understood to be trance. Trance is associated with non-rational mental experience not with the rationality identified with Kant. But as the occultist Aleister Crowley points out, it also emerges in abstract thinking. Not surprising, when trance occurs when one loses consciousness of one’s physical surroundings and deep concentration on any subject can certainly induce that. The impact of the extract from Kant was so powerful that I lost consciousness of my environment, the upper floor of the library of the University of Benin in Nigeria where I was completing a BA in 1989.When I came to myself, the sense of difference between the world of ideas to which I had travelled with the aid of the great German master and my mundane surroundings, with other readers poring quietly over their books in the slid unremarkable walls of the library, was so strong that had to ask myself "Am I occupying the same space as these people? I Later now t think /reason that Perhaps I was and yet was not. We were in the same physical space, but not in the same metal space. But to what degree are we ever in the same meta space as others? Our minds are different, our personalities s different but they are sufficiently alike for us to safely occupy the same societies and to a lesser degree, the same planet.
Questions like this about how we perceive space, time, as the time when I lost consciousness of time under the spell of the philosophers words/ideas, can that time be measured, if so, according to what criteria-an external one of the time between when I entered into it and when I came out of it and looked around me or an internal one of how I felt within that state, a sate in which I was not aware of time?-questions about how our minds experience space and time and what these experiences demonstrate about the nature of our minds is central to Kant’s thinking. For years after that experience, I could not recollect the details of what had so powerfully affected me in Kant’s words’ later had to conclude that the ideas were to some degree transgressive of the boundaries of my won conceptual world, the world of ideas that constituted my own mind so that I could not retain them after only one encounter, though a powerful one. I could only do that later through repeated reading. They were close enough though to the already established contents of my mind, though, that they could touch it powerfully.
Writers about poetry and religion make assertions similar to these I am making about my first encounter with Kant’s words. T.S. Eliot sates that he was deeply moved by some passages in Dante’s rarefied but powerfully concrete and sublime Paradiso even though he did not understand them. S.G.F Brandon, writing about the Buddha, argues that great religious reformers are both sufficiently in advance of their environment to be understood to be communicating something compellingly new but not so far removed from the world of ideas and social arrangements of their environment that their ideas could not be appreciated by people in those societies and eventually assimilated to them. These two accounts demonstrate some relationship with my experience with Kant. It was an encounter with novel ideas and expressions but intelligible enough partially intelligible to evoke a powerful response.
My second edxprience with Kant was again at the same library. This time with a quotation from him in A.W Moore’s book on The Infinite. It began with a powerfully resonant statement which is engraved on Kant’s tombstone:"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and the more steadily they are reflected upon: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me". Kant then goes on to relate his own self to the majestic motions of the celestial bodies, the sense of profound space they evoke, the idea of revolution through vast cycles of time they depict, "annihilates" his own importance as an animal creature who must give back to the earth the materials from which it has been made, having been briefly imbued with life, we know not how.The sense of mystery is resonant here in his sense of wonder and possibly gratitude at his and by implication every living being, being imbued with life through an unknown process. Not unknown in terms of its biological constitution, Kant was well informed about contemporary scientific developments and would have been informed about that, at least as much available or was known to Europe of his time, since he had first been a scholar of science before a philosopher. He is likely to have been alluding to the fact that the processes that lead to and sustain life are well known but its essential character remains unknown. Hence the mystery. Reinhold Messner, the legendary mountaineer who is the first person to climb Everest alone and without oxygen (vital to protect against oxygen thinness and subsequent brain malfunctioning at extremely high altitudes) and with minimal climbing equipment, wrote about the need to climb mountains in a manner that suggests leaving something untouched in the triumphant ascent. Something that suggests that the ascent of the mountain does not imply conquest of a wonder of nature but a journey/pilgrimage of appreciation of something that in its totality will always be beyond the human. He suggests therefore that his minimalist philosophy of climbing resents/suggests a sense /an attitude of recognition that within or i relation to the “Great White Walls” as he calls them,, there is something that he has not surmounted, something that must be reverenced through avoiding defacing the mountain through the use of/suing certain kinds of climbing equipment, through encountering, on his own, the solitude of the “Great White Walls”.
sense of worlds of possibility, vistas of being that transcend what the explorer in body and mind, as with Messner, or in thought as with Kant have explored/surveyed, emerges in the works of some of the greatest achievers. Newton writes mysteriously of not knowing how he seemed to others but that to himself he seemed/was like a child picking pebbles by the seashore, amusing himself from time to time by finding a particularly amusing pebble while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before him. Another person who uses a similar metaphor of the sea in relation to mysteries of knowledge is St.Augustine of Hippo. But Augustine was first and last a religious man and a mystic along with being a philosopher while these other writers were deeply interested in religion but were consummate rationalists. What is going on? What have they sensed or dimly perceived in the peaks/of thought they have climbed? Newton’s assertions are particularly striking in the light of the fact that he was not known for his modesty and is not understood to have been insensitive to the scope of is achievements although I wonder if he foresaw the scope of his applications in later centuries, an in the use of his principles of motion in the space exploration
Perhaps the relationships between the achievements of these thinkers and their expression of what Kant describes as a power of intelligence as demonstrated in his moral judgement which enables him to transcend the limitations of his material existence and reach into the infinite may be explained ion terms of a confidence in human cognitive powers in general and ratiocinative powers in particular arrived by years of exercising them continually beyond conventional limits that one achieves what Dion Fortune, who, with Crowley is one of the 20th century’s most famous occultists, described as seeing “beyond the skyline where the strange roads go down”.
Newton’s legacy though, is more complex than the rationalism in relation to which he is often described as one of the key figures of the Scientific Revolution. Its in the latter half of the twentieth century, in the work of Richard Westfall(Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton ;The Life of Isaac Newton,;research summarised in “Isaac Newton” in Encyclopaedia Brottanica 1992) Joe Tether-Dobbs(The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy) among others, and in the resulting online projects of the Newton Project and that the full scope of his kaleidoscopic genius as an inheritor of the religiously inspired and at times esoteric natural philosophy that stretches from Pythagoras to Kepler and perhaps to modern scientists like Paul Davies (The Mind of God) is being excavated and fleshed out.
Kant’s work at times demonstrates a poetic sensitivity which gives a sense of full blooded passion to his writing. As when he describes in his preface to the first edition (1781) of The Critique of Pure Reason, the conflicts between rival philosophical schools in the “arena of these endless contests [which] is called Metaphysics”. Nomadic groups, representing the thoroughgoing philosophical sceptics, who, in the field of thought as nomads in physical space, “hate a permanent habitation and settled mode of living”, wage raids on those who try to erect settled edifices, which, latter, in philosophical thought, will enable the direction of the mind along clearly defined lines shaped by establishing what is certain as a stepping stone to moving forward to examine what is uncertain.
Kant’s work is often dry and logically dogged, taking concentrated patience to follow, but even at those points, following his arguments enables an insight into the power of his mind that resembles peering at the hidden machinery of a high powered vehicle as it engages and shifts gears at top speed.
Comments