Between Konigsberg and Benin-City: Between Kant and Myself

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Between Konigsberg and Benin-City:

        Between Kant and Myself

        Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju 

1989. The final year of my BA in English and Literature at the University of Benin. The upper floor of the university's   Ugbowo library.

I was reading the German philosopher Immanuel Kant on the Sublime from his A Critique of Judgment, as translated into English, in Hazard Adams' edited Critical Theory Since Plato.

Under the impact of what I was reading, I vanished from the library.

The presence of my fellow library readers and the walls of the library disappeared.

I lost all consciousness of my body. I existed only as pure mind. Disembodied consciousness.

I was in a zone without spatial markers, outside time.

I came to myself as suddenly as I had left, looking round at my fellow library readers, oblivious as they were to what had happened to me.

"Am I occupying the same space as these other people?" I asked myself. 

It turns out I had not actually vanished from the library. Only my consciousness had unfixed itself from that space. 

In spite of its profound impact on me, I did not fully understand what I had read. It seemed to drain through lattices of my mind, indequate to hold the substance of the power of which had seared it.

The text's permutations were too complex, the coils of thought both delicate and powerful, as the thinker sought to engage the potently inspiring natural phenomena he was responding to, encapsulating his reflections in sentences of uncompromising force, trying to force a beam of light, as it were,  into coils of steel.

In spite of the limitations of my understanding, I was able to distill what I understood of the text's argument into my research project, contributing to gaining an A in it.

16 years later, in 2005, in the course of an MA in Comparative Literature at the University of London, I read that passage again as part of a class assignment.

I still did not fully understand it.

I expect I was still able to use what I understood in my work at the time.

When I read now about Kant's racism, I have to put in an effort to situate myself in relation to it as a Black man, one of the population of whom Kant is reputed to have declared "He was black from head to toe, an indication that anything he had to say would be stupid".

I am not able to feel outrage at what I understand is an example of self confident stupidity.

How can I, living in a different cosmos, in a country populated largely by Black people, in a classical civilization created by Black people and in a post-classical civilization partly created and run by Black people, within which context Black writers and scholars are strategic to defining the modern world of learning.

I read about the more destructive aspects of Kant's racism, bringing to mind the racism suffered by Black people in various parts of the world.

I am not able, however, to do without Kant.

A person who introduced me to the power of the combination of aesthetic sensitivity and intellectual structuring of encounter with the lofty.

Realizing that Kant is one of those whom, if I dont study, my journey on Earth is incomplete, I have been reading him carefully, examining line by line his awesomely constructed and exquisitely conceived meditation on time and eternity, mortality and immortality towards the conclusion of his Critique of Practical Reason, passages I discovered in E.W. Moore's The Infinite, again at the University of Benin's Ugbowo library when I had become an academic there.

I have also been studying Kant's magnificent Critique of Pure Reason, which began to inspire me on reading, in the library of University College, London, his introduction to that work as he describes the paradoxes and complexities of metaphysics.

Summaries of Kant are like descriptions of the taste of an orange as different from tasting the orange oneself, squeezing the golden deliciousness in a vitalizing stream down one's throat.

Kant' work is more than the positions he adopts, a limitation of presentation represented by every summary, admittedly brief ones,  of his work which  have read.

It is not assumed that paraphrasing a poem is adequate to communicate the evocative force of the poem but it seems to be assumed that summaries can encapsulate the power of such a thinker as Kant.

Impossible.

Kant's power is centred on both his journey to his destination and the point he reaches through that journey.

He is a master at "thinking it through" as Kwame Anthony Appiah  describes the philosophical quest in his book of that title.

Yet, Kant's work is also more than than the act of thinking through a philosophical subject. 

Part of his magic comes from the fact that he is struggling with something he cannot fully encapsulate in the categories of thought and expression he employs, something that expands his discourse beyond its stated aims, an underlying force that can be sensed only with sensitivity like one cultivates towards a poem.

A Critique of Pure Reason is a struggle to examine what can be ascertained as factual about religious beliefs, concluding that they cannot be intellectualy grounded beceause reason demonstrates their contradictions, yet the sheer sensitivity to the religious consciousness demonstrated by that book makes it complementary to religious texts, in my view.

His concluding reflections, in Critique of Pure Reason, on the character of the mind , comparing its creativity to that of maggots emerging unseen from matter, is sublime.

Lets follow the Konigsberg master, philosopher extraordinaire, as he takes his daily walk round the river bank in Konigsberg, the town where he lived for most of his life.

Suggested Texts as Guides to Kant

Stephan Korner in his book titled Kant, on "the metaphysical moment" as the core of Kant's work.

George Steiner's Heidegger, his opening describing Heidegger's sense of wonder at the fact of existence in a manner that also applies to Kant.

Kant' meditation on temporality and infinity in Critique of Judgment.

His analysis of creativity in "The Architectonic of Pure Reason" in A Critique of Pure Reason.