Immanuel Kant, Owusu-Ankomah and the Hunger for the Absolute : A Multicultural Exploration at the Intersection of Word and Image
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Prelude to the Microcron No.14
The hunger will not let me rest, calling to me from a distance vast and inscrutable, resolving itself into a constellation of circles, evoking all that was, is and may be.
Human reason has the peculiar fate in one sphere of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by its own nature, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every faculty of the mind.
Even then, even if the darkness of night has let down its curtains, I shall journey by whispers of light from the east, O you who are rich in beauty, here am I, a beggar, following the wondrous veiled gazelle, who points with red finger tips and winks with eyelids, enkindler of the fire within my heart, driver of the reddish white camels, in pursuit of the flash of the brilliant stones.
A dramatisation of the power of the hunger for the Absolute in relation to sensitivity to the grandeur of existence, through a very brief study of aspects of the thought of 18th century German philosopher
Immanuel Kant, correlated with verbal and visual
expressions by thinkers from different cultural and geographical
contexts.
The art of
contemporary Ghanaian-German artist Owusu-Ankomah is juxtaposed with the
expressions of other creatives, particularly Kant's, in order to suggest
amplificatory resonances between them, mutually evocative conjunctions all the
more powerful for being implicit, deriving from shared human orientations
rather than through any influence of these thinkers on Owusu-Ankomah.
I also employ pictures of Kant memorials in Kaliningrad and a picture of women on a Kaliningrad street, the city where Kant was born and lived in its former identity as Königsberg, in order to reference aspects of his life and work.
The essay is in five parts, the link between them more associative than explicit. The first part is the image and text directly after the title. The second part is the section on the stars. The third part is the discussion on knowing the Absolute. The fourth part is the meditation on the starry heavens and the moral law. The art of Owusu-Ankomah, complemented by images of Kaliningrad, the fifth part, is interspersed with the other sections.
Notes at the bottom of the essay explain the sources of quotations the sources of which are not stated in the main text. All italicised expressions are quotations from Kant. Page numbers of quotations from Kant's works are given simply as numbers, referring to the particular edition of a specific translation. They are also indicated in terms of the pages of the German edition of his works used as a universal point of reference. The numbers in the latter are preceded by the letters A and B. This convention helps identify the placing of passages from Kant's works across various translations that use this system.
Contents
Image and Text : Kant's Tomb in Kaliningrad Cathedral
The Chameleon and the Calabash as Symbols of Ultimate Knowledge and Ultimate Being in
Image and Text : Women Out and About in Kaliningrad in the Glory of a Summer's Day
Kant's Tomb in Kaliningrad Cathedral
on the island park known as the Island of Immanuel Kant
Lighting design by Ludvig Sergey
Image from Lighting Design Awards
Accessed 10/18/2021
Kant's tomb in Kaliningrad cathedral evokes, through its majestic pillars and inspired lighting, the supernal majesty dramatised by his work as he reflects on intersections between the divine, cosmic possibility and the human mind, as quoted in this essay.
Kant used to study in
the library of the cathedral in his years there in the
city's earlier incarnation as Königsberg, though he is described
as not attending church services there ( Allen Wood, Kant, 2005, 3), being perhaps detached from public religiosity. Kant was deeply spiritually committed, though, distilling
his spirituality in mental action and through relationship with nature, in dialogue with the
cosmos, dramatising these sensitivities in the progression of his writing.
He begins from the affirmation of divine order as the source of nature's order, an insight he understands himself as demonstrating in Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1775). He later goes beyond the idea that nature necessarily demonstrates a divine source. He engages with the ground of the numinous, of awesome beauty, the mysteriously powerful and majestic, in the natural universe represented by nature, the human being and their interaction with each other, without reference to a divine ground for these realities.
This second phase is evident in his meditation on the starry
heavens and the moral law in Critique of Practical Reason (1788), on the
Sublime in Critique of Judgement (1791) and suggested perhaps by his exploration of questions of divine
being and cosmic birth, ending and eternity in Critique of Pure Reason ( 1782).
It may also be seen as evoked by his keen sensitivity to the mysterious progression of mental creativity, marvellous on its own terms, without reference to any field of meaning emerging from beyond itself, as in claims to overarching spiritual agency, in his discussion of philosophical creativity in the section on the architectonic, structural wholeness in idea construction, in Critique of Pure Reason.
These shifts of orientation may be seen as demonstrating his movement from his pre-critical writings, as they are called, to his
critical phase, re-examining his own ideas in relation to correlative
conceptions in European culture.
This critical phase is described by Kant scholarship as receiving its definitive introduction with Critique of Pure Reason ( 1782), where he argues against the very views at the foundation of his
Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1775), the idea that cosmic order is clearly evidence of divine intelligence.
He argues instead, in Pure Reason, that even though the power of cosmic order, its astonishing symmetry, is compelling in suggesting that the order of the cosmos derives from divine intelligence, this inference is more of an imaginative conclusion than one following necessarily from the facts.
The silence of wonder in the face of cosmic immensity and of human ignorance of its source
may be seen as Kant's conclusive response to this subject, as I understand his argument in Pure Reason:
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.
( Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, 1998, p.579. A623 / B 65I )
"a speechless, but nonetheless eloquent, astonishment"
This is one of the
richest motifs of human thought, an opposition between the scope of existence
and the scope of human expressive capacity in its farthest reach. An opposition
so acute it is best expressed through silence. An idea all the more striking
in being declared in the midst of a galaxy of words, by a writer devoting his
life to seeking the foundational meaning of existence through study, thought
and expression.
A writer who may be seen as making a striking conclusion on the entire architecture of effort in this
quest, represented by his own work as distilling centuries of thought as he engages other thinkers from the Greeks to his own time in the Western philosophical, theological and scientific traditions. He could be understood as indicating that, when placed
side by side with the evident glory of existence as expressed in nature, these gargantuan efforts of human reflective and expressive creativity are so inadequate, silence in the face of the majesty of nature is the best response.
A paradoxical silence. A silence, that, instead of demonstrating non-communication, is a form of non-verbal expression, in which non-speech, the emptiness of sound, is pregnant with what has inspired that silence, a grandeur beyond the complex ingenuities represented by speech, even of the most accomplished.
A particularly resonant demonstration of this idea, incidentally highlighting the force of Kant's summation, is the ''thunderous silence'' of the Buddha's disciple Katsyupa, one of the disciples asked by the Buddha to sum up the essence of his teaching. To the answer of each disciple, the Buddha would respond in terms symbolising the closeness of the response to the heart of his thought, using analogies between his clothes, his skin, his bones and his marrow as symbolic for the closeness of the answer to the heart of his ideas.
''To you I give my clothes, or my skin, or my bones'' he would respond in terms of each aspect of his clothing and body, until when Katsyupa responded by bowing and maintaining a ''thunderous silence'', the Buddha responded, ''to you I give my marrow''.
The Buddha thereby equated the depth of insight into the heart of his teaching on ultimate reality represented by Katsyupa's silence as akin to the structural intimacy demonstrated by bone marrow in relation to bones as their indispensable source of nutrient.
Katsyupa's silence evokes a reality hidden as bone marrow is concealed by the bones. This reality is best evoked by silence, being beyond verbalisation, transcendent of concepts.
Kant, however, is not a mystic, like the Buddha. He is not claiming the existence of a foundational reality hidden from the eyes of most people, which special mental and ethical disciplines are required to uncover, as the Buddha used meditation and rules of conduct in penetrating to.
Kant is describing the material reality constituting the cosmos, as evident to everyone, and yet many if not most whom of whom are insensitive to its glory. The power of his summation flows from this combination of everyday reality and a sensitivity to this reality so acute it issues into stupefied silence.
The sensitivity and originality of Kant’s perceptions,
developed within the foundational but relatively limited frame represented by
the nexus of the senses, imagination and intellect, is uniquely powerful, even
more so in being exquisitely expressed in a relatively short paragraph, in one
sentence.
This orientation is correlative with another similarly sublime declaration of Kant's:
When, among other things, I consider the microscopic observations of Dr Hill [ a contemporary microbiologist] when I see numerous animal species in a single drop of water, predatory kinds equipped with instruments of destruction, intent upon the pursuit of their prey, but in their turn annihilated by the still more powerful tyrants of this aquatic world; when I contemplate the intrigues, the violence, the scenes of commotion in a single particle of matter, and when from thence I direct my gaze upwards to the immeasurable spaces of the heavens teeming with worlds as with specks of dust-when I contemplate all this, no human language can express the feelings aroused by such a thought; and all subtle metaphysical analysis falls far short of the sublimity and dignity characteristic of such an intuition.
( From The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. Translated by David Walford and Ralf Meerbote in Theoretical Philosophy, I755-I770. 1992. Note on page 159)
Utterly fantastic. Magnificent imaginative identification with the microscopic universe, bringing vividly alive it’s multifarious possibilities in terms of images of conflict, amplifying the evocative force of this world in its ultimate minisculity by correlating it with the grand sweep of the physical cosmos. The immensity and proliferation of the celestial universe is shown as paradoxically comparable to the immeasurableness of the smallest of visible material forms on Earth, specks of dust. Kant again demonstrates his genius in correlating consciousness and the universe, the most immediate and the most expansive conceptions of cosmos, evoking a theater in which the human being is suspended between two immensities, terrestrial and celestial, microscopic and cosmic.
My understanding of this aspect of Kant's cognitive biography is assisted by Stephen Palmquist's Kant and Mysticism (2019), which sensitively examines the progressions of Kant's approaches to ideas of relationships between divine intelligence and cosmic order, summing these up on page 78, part of
Palmquist's tenacious study, across various essays and books, of diverse aspects of Kant's relationship with religion.
His insightful arguments about Kant developing a form of spirituality might need to be refined, though, in favour of a spirituality of reticence, of sensitivity to human ignorance in the face of cosmic wonder, rather than an argument of human powers as being capable of reaching to depths of ultimate meaning. His conclusions on Kant as developing a form of mysticism are understandably controversial, as evident from reviews of his Kant and Mysticism, rich as that book is.
Kant's explorations of the questions of the ultimate origins of cosmic order move from arguing for the power of reason to demonstrate the divine source of cosmic order, to arguing against the possibility of such an attempt being successful. He could be seen as concluding with stupefied silence in the face of this immensity, wonder at a scope and depth beyond human understanding of its source and ultimate orientation.
This understanding of Kant bears some relationship with apophatic mysticism, in which ultimate reality is encountered through the transcendence of all concepts, all coordinates of human thought, all forms of knowing ordinarily available to humanity, a zone of awareness represented by such terms as the Christian ''darkness of unknowing'', the Buddhist ''Sunyata'', the ''Void'' and the Kabbalistic Ain Soph, the Unmanifest, the latter indicating the Ultimate as existing beyond all actualisations of existence, no matter how abstract.
Kant, however, is not arguing that a reality
exists that may be reached through any form of cognitive transcendence. He
simply argues that whether or not such a reality exists is beyond the powers of
reason to conclude. As for other capacities claimed by those who state they are
able to reach awareness of such a foundational intelligence, I am yet to
read him as examining their factuality, being outside the scope of his focus on
reason among human cognitive powers.
What is magnificent about Kant's position, an agnostic perspective not unique to him, is his dramatisation of cosmic creativity and its interplay with human creativity in a manner as glorious as even those writings from various cultures of thought across history that celebrate these realities in relation to the idea of a supervening divine intelligence.
The thinker moves from his intense, though conventional religious faith in nature as demonstrating divine presence, to one in which divine presence is unreferenced, but within which he has distilled his sensitivity to the glory of the cosmos, vibrating with potencies beyond full human understanding.
Are There Limits to What Can be Known by Human Beings?
The observations and calculations of astronomers have taught us much that is worthy of admiration, but most important, probably, is that they have exposed for us the abyss of our ignorance, which without this information human reason could never have imagined to be so great; reflection on this ignorance has to produce a great alteration in the determination of the final aims of the use of our reason.
( Pure Reason. Guyer and Wood trans. p.555. A 575/ B 603)
Howard Phillips Lovecraft incidentally evokes, with particular force, what I find compelling about this sensitivity to human ignorance, ''on the shores of the cosmic ocean'', as described by Carl Sagan in his TV series and book Cosmos:
The most
merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human
mind to correlate all its contents.
We live on a placid island of
ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not
meant that we should voyage far.
The sciences, each straining in its own
direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of
dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of
our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation
or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
( " The Call of Cthulhu")
Breaking the silence
of an ancient pond
a deep resonance.
Other Travel Sketches by Matsuo Basho. Formatting mine )
Sen Rikyū, in his garden at Sakai, obstructed the open view of the sea so that only when guests stooped at the stone basin to perform ablutions prior to entering the cha-shitsu [ the house for the contemplative ritual activity of Japanese tea] did they catch an unexpected glimpse through the trees of shimmering sea, thus suddenly being made to realize the relation of the dipperful of water lifted from the basin to the vast expanse of sea and of themselves to the universe ( "Japanese Garden", Encyclopaedia Britannica. Accessed 10/22/2021).
Along with the majesty of the minute, as represented by his response to the microscopic world quoted above, he also dramatises the glory of the grand forms of nature, and strains after the unification of the kind Lovecraft evokes but pulls back in the understanding that it is ultimately impossible to human reason.
Lovecraft's fiction plays with the idea of what may happen if such unifications are achieved, if all possibilities are plumbed, all possibilities of knowing fathomed.
What is this final or ultimate goal of reason referenced by Kant as indicated by the revelation of human ignorance by the immensity of the cosmos?
Hence the object of reason's ideal, which is to be found only in reason, is also called the original being (ens originarium); because it has nothing above itself it is called the highest being (ens summum), and because everything else, as conditioned, stands under it, it is called the being of all beings (ens entium).
( Pure Reason. Guyer and Wood trans. p. 557. A 5791 B 607 )
Yet, this powerfully resonant aspiration, the quest for the Absolute that underlies, makes possible and subsumes all possibility, is doomed to failure, the disappointed lover concludes, the reverberations of his love evident in his summation of this ultimate ideal, an idea about which he is forced to conclude:
Yet all of this does not signify the objective relation of an actual object to other things, but only that of an idea to concepts, and as to the existence of a being of such preeminent excellence it leaves us in complete ignorance.
( Pure Reason. Guyer and Wood trans. p. 557. A 5791 B 607 )
The concept of a highest being is a very useful idea in many respects; but just because it is merely an idea, it is entirely incapable all by itself of extending our cognition in regard to what exists. It is not even able to do so much as to instruct us in regard to the possibility of anything more.
( Pure Reason. Guyer and Wood trans. p. 568. A 602 / B 630 )
His summative metaphor is both commonplace and deeply memorable in its contrast between the exalted nature of the subject being discussed and the sheer absurdity of the image:
Thus the famous ontological (Cartesian [ French philosopher Rene Descartes, Kant's great predecessor at the foundations of modern Western philosophy] ) proof of the existence of a highest being from concepts is only so much trouble and labor lost, and a human being can no more become richer in insight from mere ideas than a merchant could in resources if he wanted to improve his financial state by adding a few zeros to his cash balance.
( Pure Reason. Guyer and Wood trans. p. 569. A 602 / B 630 )
Memento in Kaliningrad commemorating Kant's culture of walking, and possibly reflecting in the process. The bench suggests a place for rest while walking, while evocations of the philosopher's walking stick and hat rest on the bench. A manuscript is unfurled beside the hat, suggesting a text he could have been reading while seated on the bench.
Image source: Dreamstime. Accessed 10/18/2021
Now it cannot be expected that any one will be bold enough to declare that he
has a perfect insight into the relation which the magnitude of the world he
contemplates bears (in its extent as well as in its content) to omnipotence,
into that of the order and design in the world to the highest wisdom, and that
of the unity of the world to the absolute unity of a Supreme Being.
...
To advance to absolute totality by the empirical road is utterly impossible.
( Critique of Pure Reason. J. M. D. Meiklejohn translation of first sentence and Norman Kemp
Smith translation of last line. A628/ B 656 and A629 / B 657 582 in the German edition of
universal reference on Kant's works)
Suna
To You, the transcendent, situated beyond the abyss, beginningless, unique, yet who dwell in manifold ways in the caverns of the heart, the foundation of all this universe, and who abide in all that moves and all that moves not, to You alone, O Sambhu, I come for refuge.
( Abhinavagupta. An Introduction to Tantric Philosophy: The Paramarthasara of Abhinavagupta with the Commentary of Yogaraja. Translated by Lyne Bansat-Doudon and Kamaleshadatta Tripathi. Routledge: London, 2011. 63)
I will also admit that the boldness of Kant's
insights and the power of his arguments sometimes awaken in me feelings of admiration
toward him. If I have been successful in presenting Kant in this book, then my exposition
may perhaps awaken such feelings toward him in my readers as well.
Anticipating
the possibility of such success, I therefore issue the following advice, drawn
from my own experience: When I find myself beginning to read Kant, or any
philosopher, in a spirit of veneration, then that's a sign that I should
stop reading him for a while and choose instead the writings of some other
great philosopher (Hume, say, or Hegel) regarding whom such exceedingly
anti-philosophical sentiments are not presently sapping my critical powers and
clouding my good judgment.
( Allen Wood, Kant. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. xii)
Really? Does veneration imply being uncritical? Kant is sensitive to the sense of awe represented by the idea of God, and seems to also experience that awe, but is also able to critique efforts claiming to prove the existence of God.
This magnificent summation comes from Kant-
[ the human mind ]
throws a glance on the wonders of nature and the majesty of the world's
architecture, by which it elevates itself from magnitude to magnitude up to
the highest of all, rising from the conditioned to the condition, up to the
supreme and unconditioned author of all.
(Pure Reason. Combination of various translations. A624/B 652)
But leads to his conclusion that such sensitivities provide
comfort to the mind, but not proof of God's existence.
May veneration not be seen as recognition of superlative
value, which may be demonstrated by human beings, in spite of the
limitations of human knowledge?
May Kant not be related with as a guru in the sense of a
figure through engagement with whom one may develop understanding about
issues of ultimate value?
Wood sums up the value of studying Kant:
The true measure of Kant's value as an object of study by philosophers is the richness of the thoughts we have when we make the attempt to understand and also critically evaluate what he wrote and thought, and to relate those thoughts and our critical reflections on them to the philosophical problems that still occupy us. By that measure, to those who know him Kant is among the greatest philosophers who ever lived, whatever sort of man he may have been, and whatever we may think of his opinions on topics we care about.
( Wood, Kant, xii )
Do such orientations contradict the idea of veneration, which Wood described as leading to the following negative possibilities:
It is unhealthy and completely unphilosophical
to venerate philosophers of the past as gurus at whose feet we should sit in order
to absorb their wisdom. ...Kant regarded the practice of
those who set up others as models for imitation as morally corrupt, tending
sooner to produce either self-contempt or envy than virtue.
But that is all the
more reason to apply Kant's view on this matter to Kant himself. Even the view
itself should be given no credit at all just because Kant held it, but should
be held only because experience shows it to be true - and true even about Kant
himself.
( Wood, Kant, x )
Even then, your example, brother of Königsberg, vibrates in the caverns of my mind as an ideal I aspire to, a companion I dialogue with, a timeless presence I engage with, embodiment of a creative power I seek to cultivate in myself with your help, striving as you strived, towards a horizon compelling but unreachable.
[ In my discussions with 20th
century Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper] every question was met head on, yet seen in the context of Western thought since the pre-Socratics, a
living tradition that was in the room with us like a presence.
There were
invisible participants in every conversation: it was as if Plato, Hume, Kant
and the rest were taking part in our conversation so that everything we said had
naturally to be referred to them, and then back again to us for our critical and
often dissenting responses.
( Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher: A Journey through Western Philosophy.New York:Random House, 1997. 184)
Knowing the Absolute
The Chameleon and the Calabash as Symbols of Ultimate Knowledge and Ultimate Being in
After
creation, [ the human being ] was endowed with two minds: the precision mind and the cosmic
mind. While the precision mind analyses and reorganises the details of the
material environment, the cosmic mind synthesizes fragments of information to
create a universally significant body of knowledge.
[ The human person ] can live quite happily
using the precision mind, but...can only attain knowledge through a balanced
functioning of the two aspects of reason. At the highest point of reasoning,
significant units of information merge with universal concepts pulled together
by a unique form of intellectual power.
When the cosmic mind grinds its elements of experience into a totality of knowledge, it acquires a discipline which by its horrific power erases the boundaries between the past and the present, the living and the dead, the physical and the non-physical. The individual initiate acquires, like the chameleon’s all round vision, the capacity to conceptualise the totality of life at once. Such wisdom is enshrined in the rounded calabash of symbolic cosmic power.
( From Introduction to Anthem of the Decades. London:Heinemann, 1981. xxiii)
The image of the chameleon plays a rich spectrum of roles in classical African thought, from the epistemic evocation by Kunene to the evocation of the variety of being suggested by its capacity to seemingly change colors in blending into its environment, its role in thought dramatising the transformation of nature into symbols as marking classical African thought.
( Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, "Chameleon Symbolism in Opon Ifa", Facebook; Aetelier Wenger and Relationships between Space and Form, Space of Becoming blogspot, 12th March 2009; ''The Chameleon Gate at the Osun Forest : Portal of Transformative Meaning'', Facebook, 28 September 2010; ''A Son, his Father and his Father's Servant: The Aesthetic and Cognitive Power of Benin Olokun Narrative and Visual Symbolism'', USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google group, November 29, 2010'; Ahmadou Hampate Ba, ''The Five Teachings of the Chameleon''. All accessed 10/23/2021).
The calabash is a simple household object that is yet one of the richest of classical African metaphysical and epistemic symbols, reaching beyond those contexts even into Asian thought, the latter beautifully rendered by Daniel Odier in Tantric Quest ( Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1997, 164-165).
Olodumare-One who owns the realm of never-ending possibilities; olo--owner, odu--repository of possibility, mare--from Oshumare, the serpent of infinity- God in His/Her aspect as architect of continuous creation... the repository of possibility and circumstance from which each moment is born... the receptacle for Odu... the constellations of possibilities that contain all events past, present and future'' ( "Olorun-God in the Lukumi Faith" [ a form of the Yoruba origin Orisa tradition] in Mystic Curio. Accessed 10/16/2021).
Unifying the Yoruba Orisa and Tantric frameworks, the calabash may become an image of splintering and of gathering, as the remaining fragments of the orisa, the deity Obatala whose shattering enabled cosmic being and becoming as expressed in the detities that shape the cosmos, were collected in a calabash by his colleague Orunmila ( Ulli Beier, The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975 ).
The calabash's circularity of form is further evocative of the opon ifa of Orunmila, the space of exploration of the intersection of being and becoming, explorations pursued through the symbolic subsummations of possibilities known as odu ifa, among a swarm of ideas evoked by this marvellous image.
( Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, "Ifa and Generative Space", Space of Becoming blog, 12th March, 2009; ''The Vagina and the Womb:Female Procreative Spaces as Metaphysical Symbols: Classical Forms and their Contemporary Adaptations:Source Text'', Spatial Transformations blog, 9th November 2009, "Space of Becoming: The Feminine as Metaphysical Matrix in Classical African Thought Exemplifiedby the Orisa Tradition", Scribd. All accessed 10/22/2021).
Microcron
Begins No. 1
2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 140 x 139 cm11 / 44
Surveying circles of ultimacy and configurations of understanding
He is not able, however, to share in such a glorious vision as depicted by Kunene, preferring to steer clear of such claims as being beyond the powers of reason as conventionally accessible and therefore beyond claims of knowing that may be readily assessed for their validity, even though his work is radiantly celebratory of the powers of human reason within the scope of its conventional character as he understands it.
Dante on Perceiving the Cosmos as a Simple Flame
cosmic journey in his Divine Comedy are the following lines, slightly expanded here by the addition of explanatory text, lines described by Robin Kirkpatrick in his translation of that book as among the most impressive in European literature:
( Paradise. Divine Comedy. Chapter 33. Stanzas as translated and annotated by Barbara Reynolds)
Death on the Transcendence of Death in the Upanishads
Centuries before Dante, another writer from another geographical and cultural context outlined a similar aspiration, putting in a little more effort into depicting the methods to be used in pursuing such a goal.
Count the links of the chain:
worship the triple Fire: knowledge, meditation, practice;
the triple process: evidence, inference, experience;
the triple duty: study, concentration, renunciation;
understand that everything comes from Spirit, that Spirit alone is sought and found;
attain everlasting peace; mount beyond birth and death.
When man understands himself, understands universal Self,
the union of the two, kindles the triple Fire,
offers the sacrifice;
then shall he,
though still on earth, break the bonds of death, beyond sorrow, mounts into
heaven.
( From The Ten Principal Upanishads. Translated by Shree Purohit Swami and W.B. Yeats. London: Faber and Faber, p.27. In holy.books.com. Accessed 10/9/2021)
…the mind [ reaches its ] desired potential through fire… essential for the changing of things from their raw inaccessible qualities to a ripe state of richness and healing…a process capable of positively affecting other phenomena and triggering in them their inner powers of inter-phenomenal nourishment. … an outcome of slow burning characteristic of the cosmic process.
A fruit is ripened by the sun-fire. The body is ripened by the blood-fire. The
mind is ripened by the life-fire. Fire matures things, changes them, translates
them to a higher order which is the capacity to nourish phenomena other than
themselves. This process demonstrates the highest cosmic ideal, that is, an
interdependence within all living phenomena.
( Anthem, xxiii-xxiv )
As demonstrated by Maurice Bucke in Cosmic Consciousness (Part III, Section IX, 1923, 72) , imagery of fire, of light and its association with physical and cognitive illumination, recur in mysticism, the quest for the grasp of ultimate reality. Though not referenced in this context by Kant, such aspirations resonate with his magnificently evocative summation of the idea of understanding the cosmos in its scope and content, its order in relation to the order of its originating intelligence, goals described so confidently, in different contexts, by Kunene, Dante and the Upanishads and which Kant argues cannot be reached by reasoning through the evidence generally available to humanity.
Accessed 10/20/2021
The beautiful and the Sublime. Kant's philosophy may be understood as revolving on those qualities, wondering about their implications for human knowledge.
Did the rhythms of feminine presence, as in the picture above, influence his work? Did he reflect on the glories of feminine form and being, its evocation of the sublimity of the creative forces that enable it, biological dynamics emerging from an ultimately unknown source, central motifs of the inscrutability of nature's majesty, another central theme of his?
Many forces of nature that express their existence only through certain effects remain inscrutable for us, for we cannot trace them far enough through observation.
Pure Reason. Guyer and Wood trans. p. 574. A614/ B 642
The master of Konisgberg, whose reflections on the beautiful and the Sublime in nature may not be surpassed anywhere in history, is not described as having been able to appreciate feminine beauty and being. Can his ideas assist in doing what he did not do, exploring subjects he did not address?
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.
I do not need to search for them and merely conjecture them as though they were veiled in darkness or were in the transcendent region beyond my horizon…
I see them before me and associate them directly with the consciousness of my own existence.
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 from my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world which has true infinity, but which is traceable only by the understanding, and with which I discern that I am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and necessary connection, as I am also with all those visible worlds.
The former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature, which, after it has been for a short time provided with vital power, one knows not how, must again give back the matter of which it was formed to the planet it inhabits (a mere speck in the universe).
The second, on the contrary, infinitely elevates my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world-at least as far as may be inferred from the destination assigned to my existence by this law, a destination not restricted to conditions and limits of this life, but reaches into the infinite.
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Readily accessible accounts of a variant of this story are that in which the questioner is Boddhidarma, a Buddhist luminary, not the Buddha, as told, among other sources, in Paul Reps' Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (Penguin, 1971, 12) based perhaps on the story of Dazu Huike, described as the disciple who answered with silence. An older source for the motif is the Vimalakirti Sutra ( circa 100 CE), in which grand descriptions of reality culminate in silence as the ultimate summation of the essence of being.
The poem "Cold" (A Simple Lust, pp. 52-53) was written between two prisons. I was kept in a prison in Pretoria for observation; then they decided I was very dangerous, so they sent me to the maximum security prison on a kind of Devil 's Island off the coast of Cape Town called "Robben Island. "
This poem is written about being in transit. We travelled about a thousand miles, sixty of us chained together and put in a truck. We are barefooted, and all we have on is a pair of little short pants. We stop at midnight at a small prison where they give us each a bowl of porridge. No milk, no sugar, and no spoon, so you just eat it with your fingers, then get back in the truck and carry on. This poem is about that experience:
the clammy cement
sucks our naked feet
a rheumy yellow bulb
lights a damp grey wall
the stubbled grass
wet with three o'clock dew
is black with glittering edges;
we sit on the concrete,
stuff with our fingers
the sugarless pap
into our mouths
then labour erect;
form lines;
steel ourselves into fortitude
or accept an image of ourselves
numb with resigned acceptance;
the grizzled senior warder comments:
"Things like these
I have no time for;
they are worse than rats;
you can only shoot them"
Overhead
the large frosty glitter of the stars
the Southern Cross flowering low;
the chains on our ankles
and wrists
that pair us together
jangle
glitter.
We begin to move
awkwardly.
[Colesberg: en route to Robben Island]