Remembering and Understanding: Introducing an Autobiographical, Multi-Cultural and Interdisciplinary Journey with Immanuel Kant and Kantian Scholarship
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Kant Contemplates Infinity
through contemporary Ghanaian-German artist and philosopher Owusu-Ankomah's thinker immersed in
a sea of symbols, structurations of reality through which humans try
to move between phenomena, things as they appear, to noumena, things as they
really are, English translations of Kant's terms on the structure of reality,
with Kant described as holding that things as they really are are beyond human
understanding, even as he dramatises the profound appeal of the urge to comprehend existence in its totality.
These symbols move from previously existing forms such as Ghanaian Adinkra to snowflake formations to the five pointed star to Ankomah's own construct, the Microcron, a circle of multi-coloured circles symbolizing universes in universes, cosmic multiplicity and unity.
Ankomah unifies the inspiration of French artist Auguste Rodin’s iconic sculpture The Thinker, muscles bulging as the figure strains all his being in mental concentration, with his own sensitivity to his personal physical and cognitive development, in relation to his immersion in varied thought systems, an immersion akin to a fish swimming within the sustaining powers of the ocean, suggested by the liquid blue pervading the painting, embracing both thinker and symbols, the contemplative and the means of reflection, a tableau incidentally evoking the inner world of the self, in dialogue with the outer cosmos, forms of infinity, as described by Kant on the starry heavens and the moral law in Critique of Practical Reason.
''Two things fill the mind with ever new and ever greater admiration and awe, the more often and the more steadily they are reflected upon: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me...
The first begins at the place which I occupy in the external world of the senses, and broadens the connection in which I stand into the unsurveyable magnitude of worlds upon worlds and systems upon systems, as well as into the limitless times of their periodic motion, their beginning and continuation. The second begins at my invisible self, my personality, and displays to me a world which has true infinity…''
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason. Collage of lines from various translations.
“...Kant usually fasted on 'nothing but water' in between the one meal he ate each day. …upon returning home from his walks, he would spend the next few hours doing what could well be called contemplation: 'As darkness began to fall, he would take his seat at the stove, and with his eye fixed on the tower of Loebenicht church would ponder on the problems which exercised his mind.’ "
Stephen R Palmquist, Kant and Mysticism: Critique as the Experience of Baring All in Reason’s Light. London: Lexington, 2019. 79.
Owusu-Anokomah's thought and art are well represented by the brief but rich interview of the artist with Gerard Houghton, Owusu-Ankomah: Microcrocron-Kusum: Secret Signs, Hidden Meanings, 2011 and the expansive multi-authored volume with an essay by the artist, Owusu Ankomah: Microcron Begins, 2014. A particularly rich multiperson interview with him is the April 29, 2013 Face to Facebook Art Talk at the University of African Art, organised and moderated by Moyo Okediji. Among numerous repretations online of his art and thought are the October Gallery page on his exibition Owusu-Ankomah: Microcrocron-Kusum: Secret Signs, Hidden Meanings and the page dedicated to his work in general on the same site as well as his own website.
Abstract
A description of my mission and the inspiration for this mission in my ongoing study of the work and life of 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, exploring his work through convergences between his cognitive biography, his journey of knowledge, and mine. The main essay is interspersed with a contemporary photograph of Kant's birthplace, where he lived and worked, Konigsberg, now Kaliningrad, and images from African and Western art, correlated with discussions of specific aspects of Kant's work.
Contents
Image and Text : Kant Contemplating Infinity with Owusu-Ankomah's Thinking the Microcron
Remembering and Understanding
Exploring the Intersection of My Cognitive Biography with that of Kant
Image and Text: Connections through Sense Perception
Discussing Kant as Illuminating Daily Human Life and its Ultimate Significance
Image and Text: Concentric Circles of Cosmic Motion and Infinite Development
Evoked by the Ghanaian Adinkra symbol Adinkrahene
Initiation into the Thrill of Studying Kant
Image and Text: Exoteric Visibility and Esoteric Mystery Evoked
by Contemporary Nigerian Artist Bruce Onobrakpeya's Shrine Set
Developing a More Intimately Humanised Image of Kant's Philosophical Quest
Image and Text: The Soft Planet of Brain Pulsing with Thought and Sensing with Victor Ekpuk's Children of the Full Moon
Between Exploration and Justification
Image and Text: Time and TTimelessness, Mortality and Immortality with Rembrandt's Self-Portrait
Delight in Human Creativity as a Kantian Inspiration
Remembering and Understanding
At about 3 am on the 21st of September, 2021, facing my computer as I worked on my essay on the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, I came to two realizations. Given the ease and scope of progress on the project, it is growing into what is likely to be a book. Shortly after that, I also recalled that day was my birthday, from noting the significance of the date on the computer.
It's possible to forget that one's birthday is approaching. But how can one write a book without knowing that one is doing so?
Exploring the Intersection of My
Cognitive Biography with that of Kant
That correlation between unawareness and the obvious, exploring the significance of what is evident but inadequately understood, is at the core of the work on Kant I'm engaged in. I'm exploring my recurrent encounters with Kant's work across thirty-one years as a point of entry into his creativity as it intersects with the development of my life. This helps me grasp what his work contributes to understanding the meaning of my growth in relation to progress in the quest that unifies my cognitive biography and that of Kant, the search for knowledge of fundamental and ultimate realities.
Having reached an above 20,000-word count without strain as the essay continues to grow, it's become clear that the work is growing towards what might become a book length text, one which is likely to make original contributions to Kant scholarship. The progress of the project is inspired by my reading scholarship on Kant as well as studying Kant's works.
These explorations are expanding in the context of the seemingly infinite access to these materials and to texts that complement them enabled by the resources available to me. These resources are my own library and particularly the controversial, but in my case, indispensable shadow libraries Zlibrary, PDFDrive, Libgenesis and Sci-Hub, which provide free access to books and articles. I am observing myself using this wealth of access with some sensitivity to the place of the insights they provide in the already clear structure of the growing project.
This essay, for example, draws upon translations of Kant's central work, Critique of Pure Reason, by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Max Muller, Werner Pluhar, Norman Kemp Smith, J. M. D. Meiklejohn and by Marcus Weigelt, based on Muller's translation.
Comparing these translations, representing generations of Kant scholarship, from Muller's 1922 publication to Kemp Smith's landmark 1929 rendition to the most recent effort known to me, by Guyer and Wood, 1998, helps clarify Kant's meaning and his style of expression, through the prism of various ways of depicting them.
Connections
People crossing a
bridge linking the island where Kant's tomb is located in Kaliningrad cathedral
and another island in the island network constituting the city where Kant was
born and worked in its earlier Prussian identity as Konigsberg, before its
annexation by Russia and the name change to Kaliningrad as a consequence of WWII.
Water and land, plants and buildings, humans and engineering constructs, convergences of the natural and the human-made, resonate with descriptions of Kant's theory of perception, in which the structure of the mind shapes how it is able to interpret the stimulations of the senses by the material universe, interpretations constituting what is understood of reality.
Echoes of creative construction, from thought to material forms, reverberate in the opening paragraph of Kant's introduction to the first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason as seen in this collage from various English translations of that work:
That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For what else might rouse our cognitive powers to action if not objects that stimulate our senses, producing representations, rousing our powers of understanding, to compare, to connect, or to separate these representations, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience?
In respect of time, therefore, no cognition in us precedes experience, and with experience every cognition begins.
Kant recurrently uses metaphors, images vividly picturing his ideas by appealing to the sense of sight. He thereby enables the reader to better appreciate his abstractions by relating them to concrete realities people can readily imagine, an approach dramatising his understanding of the senses as foundational to knowledge.
A striking image he employs in picturing his philosophical goals is that of an island, surrounded by a treacherous sea. Using this picture akin to his birthplace, where he lived, he projects his vision of establishing secure foundations in the quest for foundational and ultimate realities. He images the island of truth, as he names it, from which vantage point he surveys the surrounding sea of illusion, unfruitful approaches to the quest for knowledge. The image compellingly suggests a sense of urgency, of risk and reward, of the dynamism of cognitive exploration that shapes Kant's work:
We have now not only traveled through the land of pure understanding, and carefully inspected each part of it, but we have also surveyed it, and determined the place for each thing in it.
But this land is an island, and enclosed in unalterable boundaries by nature itself. It is the land of truth (a charming name), surrounded by a broad and stormy ocean, the true seat of illusion, where many a fog bank and rapidly melting iceberg pretend to be new lands and, ceaselessly deceiving with empty hopes the voyager looking around for new discoveries, entwine him in adventures from which he can never escape and yet also never bring to an end.
But before we venture out on this sea, to search through all its breadth and become certain of whether there is anything to hope for in it, it will be useful first to cast yet another glance at the map of the land that we would now leave, and to ask, first, whether we could not be satisfied with what it contains, or even must be satisfied with it out of necessity, if there is no other ground on which we could build; and, second, by what title we occupy even this land, and can hold it securely against all hostile claims.
Critique of Pure Reason. Ch.3. Bk. 2. Division1. ''On the Ground of the Distinction of all Objects in General into Phenomena and Noumena.'' Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood.Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 354. B295/A236 in the German editions of universal reference. Paragraphing by myself.
Discussing Kant as Illuminating Daily Human Life and its Ultimate Significance
I aspire to present the relationship of Kant's work to the intimate, daily dimensions of human experience and the ultimate significance of these immediate realities, developing this understanding at the intersection of autobiography and multi-cultural thought and art.
Without our ability to see, hear, touch and smell, how would we make sense of the world and move around in it?
What is the relationship between our awareness of ourselves and our awareness of the world? What can we know as different from what we cannot know but can only believe, if we wish to believe?
How should we live in the midst of these perplexities, as we wonder if God exists, if the universe had a beginning or whether it will end, as we study the structure and dynamism of the cosmos and are inspired by the grandeur of existence in the midst of human mortality?
I understand these questions as summing up the essence of what I have learnt so far in these opening stages of my explorations of Kant's philosophical quest. I am studying Kant’s continuous journey into understanding as it was recurrently rethought by him from his 20s to its termination by his transition in his 70s, a quest combining both ambition to totality of knowledge of the nature and logic of the conditions that define existence and a growing awareness of the impossibility of such totalitistic knowing, that tension being central to his contribution to human thought.
Concentric Circles of Cosmic Motion and Infinite Development
Evoked by the Ghanaian Adinkra symbol Adinkrahene
Kant's work is shaped by an acute sensitivity to the location of human temporal and cognitive finitude within cosmic physical and temporal scope, contexts stimulating ideas both deeply compelling and impossible to resolve, being beyond the capacity of the human mind, as he understood it.
"Our reason...has this peculiar fate that, with reference to one class of its knowledge, it is always troubled with questions which cannot be ignored, because they spring from the very nature of reason, and which cannot be cannot be answered, because they transcend the powers of human reason."
Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason. Preface to first edition. Translated by Max Muller.London: Macmillan, 1922. xvii.
He dramatizes, in the following striking lines, an unresolvable paradox arising from the human compulsion to seek for the source of all possibilities in an ultimate cause, a cause which itself has no cause, that being one definition of God:
Unconditioned necessity, which, as the ultimate support and stay of all existing things, is an indispensable requirement of the mind, is an abyss on the verge of which human reason trembles in dismay.
Even the idea of eternity, terrible and sublime as it is… does not make such a dizzying impression on the mind, does not produce upon the mental vision such a feeling of awe and terror…
What is the precise nature of this abyss that generates such an overwhelming impact?
We cannot put aside and yet cannot endure the thought that a being that we represent to ourselves as the highest among all possible beings might, as it were, say to itself: "I am from eternity to eternity, outside me is nothing except what is something merely through my will; but whence then am I?"
God is pictured as enquiring into his own origins. ‘’If all causes ultimately originate in God, what is the cause of God?,’’ that line of reasoning runs.
“Is the idea of God no more than an idea? Does it have any correspondence with any reality outside the minds of those who hold that conception?” Kant’s assertions may be thus reframed as questions.
"Can the mere increase of numbers in a numerical record of a financial account actually increase the amount of money in that account?” Kant may be pictured as asking, using an image in which he argues that generating an idea such as the idea of an ultimate cause that itself has no cause, does not imply such an idea refers to any existing reality apart from the idea. The idea of God does not imply that God actually exists.
He then dramatizes a possible effect on the mind which is shocked by this line of reasoning out of its previous belief in this idea, an effect depicted as a mental earthquake:
Here everything gives way beneath us, and the greatest perfection [ attributed to the idea of an ultimate cause] as well as the smallest, merely hovers unsupported before speculative reason, which makes not the least effort to retain either the one or the other, and feels indeed no loss in allowing them to vanish entirely [ all faith in the idea is abandoned].
( These quotations are a collage of lines from various translations of Critique of Pure Reason, specifically the section "On the Impossibility of a Cosmological Proof of God's Existence." The references to the relationship between the idea of God and the existence of God are from the proceeding section "On the Impossibility of an Ontological Proof of the Existence of God". They are both from ''Transcendental Doctrine of Elements.'' Division two. Bk. 2. Ch. 3. Sections IV and V)
Kant is recurrently striking in evoking the drama of cognitive quest, possibly drawing on his personal experience. The quotes directly above may depict his own movement from being an ardent believer in the ability of human reason to demonstrate the existence of God, to a person who became convinced such proofs are impossible, holding that God can be engaged with only through faith.
Initiation into the Thrill of Studying Kant
What has drawn me to Kant?
A revelatory experience on reading him for the first time in a selection from an English translation of his Critique of the Power of Judgement, his central work on aesthetics, the study of beauty and of art. The effect was so powerful I entered into trance, losing consciousness of myself and of the University of Benin's Ugbowo campus library where I was reading this. Similar, though not as intense, encounters with Kant have occurred for me in various libraries, from the same library in Benin-City to the library of the University of London and in my own library in Lagos.
"What is this man really saying?," I am now provoked to ask after these years of fascination and occasional engagement. "Let's relate closely with his work and with people's views on it and see what these tell us," I have resolved. Steadily, Kant opens up for me in his efforts to make sense of the miracle of existence, exploring how much human beings can know about it and how and why they can gain such knowledge.
Exoteric Visibility and Esoteric Mystery
Evoked by Contemporary Nigerian Artist Bruce Onobrakpeya's Shrine Set
Onobrakpeya is a master at demonstrating the evocation of the mysterious and the uncanny through the agency of the visible enabled by classical Nigerian shrine art, doing this through his own self created constructs, such as the humanoid and abstract figures in this sculptural installation, in harmony with his Ibiebe script inscribed on the screen.
What is visible of the cosmos is a screen for something unknowable by the human being, Kant is described as asserting, even as he celebrates the grandeur of existence as capable of moving one beyond all possibilities of expression into speechlessness, from thought to silence, as the human being is overwhelmed by the magnificence of it all, gloriously visible yet mysterious.
The present world discloses to us such an immeasurable showplace of manifoldness, order, purposiveness, and beauty, whether one pursues these in the infinity of space or in the unlimited division of it, that in accordance with even the knowledge about it that our weak understanding can acquire, all speech concerning so many and such unfathomable wonders must lose its power to express, all numbers their power to measure, and even our thoughts lack boundaries, so that our judgement upon the whole must resolve itself into a speechless, but nonetheless eloquent, astonishment.
(Critique of Pure Reason. "On the Impossibility of the Physicotheological Proof [ of the Existence of God].'' ''Transcendental Doctrine of Elements." Division two. Bk. 2. Ch. 3 Section VI. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, 1998, 579. A623 / B 65I in the German editions of universal reference.)
Developing a More Intimately Humanised Image of Kant's Philosophical Quest
I am contributing to humanizing Kant's thought, making it more readily appreciated as speaking to everyone, everywhere, not only to those ready to engage first hand the sophistication of his ideas and styles of expression, a sophistication I am contributing to demonstrating as open to being made accessible to most people in terms of its beauty and power without diluting it's force.
Do I expect to provide any new interpretations of the general direction or specifics of Kant's work?
I am constructing an understanding of Kant that contributes to appreciation of how his work can inspire individual quests for fundamental and ultimate meaning. I am also crafting close readings of strategic Kantian passages that might not have been discussed before in terms of such line-by-line analysis. Whatever might have previously been achieved along those lines, I expect what I'm offering to represent a new slant on these efforts.
The Soft Planet of Brain
Pulsing with Thought and Sensing
as described by contemporary Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka in The Credo of Being and Nothingness, may be seen as evoked by contemporary Nigerian-US artist Victor Ekpuk's Children of the Full Moon, in which a circle of variegated forms, both previously existing and self created, the entire structure tantalisingly suggesting the idea of unified meaning while delivering none beyond the impression of dynamic harmony, demonstrates Ekpuk's exploration of tension between visibility and understanding, between the obvious and the concealed, between the exoteric and the esoteric, adapting the Nsibidi hermeneutics, principles of expression and interpretation, of the Ekpe/Mgbe esoteric order from his native Cross River region of Nigeria.
The creative dynamism of the human mind, in dialogue with a universe perceived but inadequately understood, is a central theme of Kant's work.
Architectural construction, the hidden unfolding of a seed till it bursts into light, the sudden emergence of maggots after hidden generation, among his intriguing metaphors for the creative process in the section ''The Architectonic of Pure Reason'' in A Critique of Pure Reason, indicate the range and sensitivity of Kant's understanding of creativity, likely drawing from his own decades long experience in gestating his ideas.
Between Exploration and Justification
Why this struggle to argue for doing something new in relation to Kant's work, granted Kant scholarship has been growing for more than three centuries? Why not simply engage Kant for one's own benefit, one's effort to comprehend something that strikes one deeply, using writing about one's explorations as a means of clarifying one's growing awareness?
Does one's enjoyment of a novel, a poem or a film, and one's notes on that enjoyment as it relates to the views of others need to be justified in terms of others' views on that work of art, such delightful engagement being how I see much of my relationship with Kant's work?
Such an approach to Kant in terms of pleasure, even the pleasure of knowledge, the delight of mental exercise in ideas, seems unusual in the first place in the general understanding of Kant. This contrast between my approach to Kant and the general orientation to his work as I understand these perspectives suggests that such an approach as I am developing could contribute to making Kant's work better appreciated, even if it does not aspire to generate new interpretations of the philosopher but only seeks to explore and re-present his work from a particular direction.
This stance I am cultivating sees Kant not as the distantly brilliant mandarin of knowledge, akin to the exalted classical Chinese officials of high learning far from common experience, as this class is perceived in their title becoming metaphorical in English, but as a fellow traveller who walks the goat's Earth, as with his hands he touches God's sky, as a poem from the Kuba of the Congo puts it of the earthly foundations of human experience and it's celestial and divine orientations, a tension and harmony at the heart of Kant's work.
But perhaps, new perceptions may emerge as I dialogue with my friend from Konigsberg, Kant's home town, where he spent most of his life. Speaking with him and with others who dialogue with him, one could be led into insights into issues perhaps yet undiscussed in Kant scholarship.
Such insights could involve moving from correlations between Kant's ideas on the Sublime, on grandeur in the Earth and the cosmos, and those of Rudolph Otto, on the numinous, "an invisible but majestic presence that inspires both dread and fascination and constitutes the non-rational essence of vital religion", as Webster's dictionary defines it, ideas that could illuminate my encounters with sacred spaces, across explorations of Western, Asian and African spiritualities, as in Benin-City's Ogba forest, my most compelling experience of the sacred.
These correlations could extend to the Yoruba concept of "ase”, cosmic force both concentrated in sacred spaces and facilitating individual creativity, ideas also correlative with the German term "Geist", a concept strategic for German thought in meaning both "mind" and "spirit, leading also to the related Asian terms, the Indian "shakti" and the Chinese "chi".
These conjunctions could be pursued as I illuminate correlations between Kant's work and Asian, African and Western art, specific universes of possibility that may be new to the field in spite of years of Kant scholarship discussing Kant in relation to various cultural contexts.
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time and timelessness
mortality and immortality
exemplified by 17th century Dutch artist Rembrandt, shaping lines and paint into a conjuration of what is almost a living human being, eyes alert with the vitality of intelligence in a face contoured by decades of time in a challenging world, a distillation of experience further evoked by the contemplative darkness from which the face emerges, a manifestation of art's capacity to bridge time and space in making visible what unites humanity everywhere, everytime, as inimitably projected by Rembrandt's self-portraits, as in the detail above of one in the Frick Collection, portraits spanning his youth to his old age, dramatizing both the gaiety and freshness of youth and young manhood and the sober presence and physical transformations of age, creations that outlive their creator, subsisting forever.
Rembrandt ls ''the outstanding chronicler of the human face, daily altered by experience, and of the heart’s journey through love, grief, despair and every imaginable emotion. [The 19th century Dutch-French artist ] Van Gogh [ insightfully] wrote that 'Rembrandt says things for which there are no words in any language.' ”
Laura Cumming, ''Rembrandt and Saskia: A Love Story for the Ages.'' Guardian UK.Sun 30
Dec 2018.
The light of consciousness, the glitter o f intelligence, the capacity to sharpen awareness of the glory and paradoxes of existence, conceiving even what is beyond grasp by the mind as the totality of being tantalises with its unfathomable depth and force, these sensitivities define Kant's work as he reflects on the human being, returning to the earth its elements after being gifted for a short time with life through an unknown process, yet able to transcend these limitations by entry into a destination beyond the limits of this life, piercing into the infinite, the conclusion of his famous meditation in Critique of Practical Reason on the starry heavens and the moral law.
Delight in Human Creativity as a Kantian Inspiration
Is there anything more beautiful than the exercise of natural powers?
Thinking, walking, sex, emotion, touching, all these and more testify to the awareness that one exists, one is alive and one is aware of these realities.
"Dare to trust your own intelligence", the man of Konigsberg sums up in "What is Enlightenment?" , his essay on the Enlightenment, the European philosophical movement that inspired him and to which he contributed.
The dash of the leopard across the savannah, the gliding of the fish in the sea, the potent tread of the elephant, the sinuous twisting of the snake in it's motions across points, are as the creative power of the mind exalting in it's own capacity to explore itself and the cosmos, explorations from within the potencies of thought that Kant pursued in a lifetime of unending quest.
You may follow my journey with Kant through this link:
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to your fingertips, at the intersection of the visual and verbal arts,
spirituality, philosophy and science, is my mission.
You are invited to donate to this task.
Compcros from where this project comes, is one of the world's largest, single author created, free access scholarship and writing platforms, exploring diverse ways of knowing across the world.
Cornelius Hamelberg
Dear Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju ,
Has it ever occurred to you that you would very well be a reincarnation of Senor Kant – as per Gilgul? No kidding! Hence the fascination, the passion, the monumental monomaniacal obsession with that dude. Perhaps you remember bits and pieces of what he thought, his cogitations and writings from his former life over there in Königsberg. Did he/you then show an avid interest in big booty? Of course, it was another body, culture, time, and place...
Recently, I listened to this interesting ten-minute take on the idea. There's Allan Cronshaw who says that he used to be James, the brother of Jesus.
BTW, I think that Jimi Hendrix is an incarnation of Robert Johnson
I suppose that you have already taken the Bodhisattva vow – to keep on coming until everybody is free...
This just came in
Wishing you a pleasant day, away from ransom kidnappers, marauding Fulani Herdsmen...
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
The Encyclopedia Brittannica 1971 ed article on Kant where I first read about him states ''Kant had a low opinion of women and did not marry'.
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OLAYINKA AGBETUYI
Dear Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju ,
Has it ever occurred to you that you would very well be a reincarnation of Senor Kant – as per Gilgul? No kidding! Hence the fascination, the passion, the monumental monomaniacal obsession with that dude. Perhaps you remember bits and pieces of what he thought, his cogitations and writings from his former life over there in Königsberg. Did he/you then show an avid interest in big booty? Of course, it was another body, culture, time, and place...
Recently, I listened to this interesting ten-minute take on the idea. There's Allan Cronshaw who says that he used to be James, the brother of Jesus.
BTW, I think that Jimi Hendrix is an incarnation of Robert Johnson
I suppose that you have already taken the Bodhisattva vow – to keep on coming until everybody is free...
This just came in
Wishing you a pleasant day, away from ransom kidnappers, marauding Fulani Herdsmen...
Cornelius Hamelberg
Dear Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,
Many thanks for your intriguing response.
It is my fervent hope that very soon, a special chair will be created for you, somewhere, maybe at Professor Olukotun's University, backed by very strong recommendations from e.g. Nimi Woriboko who has already at least designated you with genius status. Whilst the mineux, sardines, les petits poissons dans l'eau may be bubbling, grovelling and worrying about tenure and what quality of credits should merit full and half professorships, you could be sitting comfortably unperturbed and undisturbed in your chair, on your own throne, specially created for you; “The Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju Chair”, just as Professor Falola is sitting as Lord of all that he surveys from the comfort zone where he sits: The Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin.
You have my vote on the matter, with this little reservation: the occasional impression you give the unwary about al-Islam – a great religion, and our Nigerian Brethren, the Fulani Herdsmen, that simply has to be amended...
But back to your flesh, blood and brain idol, Kant, one would have thought that his interest/non-interest even aversion to Big booty was beyond the scope of any philosophical investigations, but alas, you have served us with another saucy biographical heresy – that the unnamed lady in question wanted her clock to be wound, and the screw to be turned, satisfactorily, by Mr Kant the celibate; difficult enough for a connoisseur of big booty to believe that “his knowledge of sexual fulfilment must have been primarily theoretical.”
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Lord Agbetuyi,
If only Kant would have told us in his own words, we would not have had to speculate. On the other hand, how can we be sure that he would have been telling the truth, twenty four hours a day?
1.The Prophet of Islam ( peace be upon him) famously pronounced on prayer, women and perfume .
There is no monkery in Islam.
2. Not all of us are gross chasers of big booty or subtle & sophisticated connoisseurs of the feminine mystique.
3. When it comes to the “brain workers,”sometimes, strange are the ways of philosophers, such as Bertrand Russell's most startling autobiographical confession for which perhaps he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, as he tells us; “ I went out cycling one afternoon, and suddenly, as I was riding along a country road, I realised that I no longer loved Alys.” That's not the absent-minded professor , or the little pamphleteer, but the man of these major works , for you; the realisation came, not in his bed on in his study, but on his bicycle.
4. It may be old hat , but who is exempt from the tumultuous forces of id, ego, super-ego be he philosopher, ascetic or artist ? We have Sartre and sex
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Remembering, lest I forget, this had better not be left unsaid in this thread, that, unlike Senor Adepoju's idol, our Bertie ( Bertrand Russell) also a man of his age, cannot be accused of racism.
His so simple and clearly written “ The Problems of Philosophy” was the book that Hugh Kenner chose to introduce us to the subject (in September 1965) that and “Introduction to Logic” by Irving M. Copi, Carl Cohen, but before the very first lecture, we were required to write an essay on the subject “Can a dead man feel? “ Of course, the essay topic could have been slightly ameliorated and a little more direct if the question had been, “Can a dead man smoke marijuana?” Akintola Wyse ( stiff upper lip Methodist) was my roommate then - I had given him the nickname “Cromwell”, years earlier. He gaped at me when I asked him the question and started replying, “ Well, historically speaking” etc. but I cut him off – “ Aki , we're talking philosophy now, not history.” I tried to convince him that metaphysics is a very mysterious subject. We were classmates for “ Greek and Roman Culture” with Miss Dolphin...
My apologies for misquoting Nobel Laureate Russell ( it's, of course, a lot worse, more sinful, misquoting the Bible but Russell didn't write, “I went out cycling one afternoon..” like the real Englishman of his day, and such was the state of the English Language then that gentleman didn't go out cycling, they “ bicycled” and back then the radio was known as “the wireless”. Don't be a prig now Cornelius, Lord Russell wrote “ I went out bicycling one afternoon, and suddenly, as I was riding along a country road, I realised that I no longer loved Alys.” It was a spontaneous realisation, akin to the apple falling from the tree and hitting Newton on his head.
Trust Russell to philosophise about the matter there and then ( or maybe when he returned home from his bicycling tour, and here he writes with such candour and such honesty, letting us all into the workings of his mind, and his innermost secrets, simple and clear-cut, no big grammar :
“I had had no idea until this moment that my love for her was even lessening. The problem presented by this discovery was very grave. We had lived ever since our marriage in the closest possible intimacy. We always shared a bed, and neither of us ever had a separate dressing-room. We talked over together everything that ever happened to us… I knew that she was still devoted to me. I had no wish to be unkind, but I believed in those days…that in intimate relations one should speak the truth.”