Kant, the Seed, the Maggots and the Tower of Babel ( Expanded and Edited)

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

 Kant, the Seed, the Maggots and the Tower of Babel 

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

Compcros

Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

My friend at Konigsberg, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, is not given adequate credit for the range of his creativity.

He is often presented as an uncompromisingly difficult writer, creator of a forest of abstruse terminology and long winded sentences which put off  most people.

How true is this?

Not completely true.

Kant is not more challenging to understand than some highly individualistic poetry, such as that of the Nigerian writer Christopher Okigbo, powetfully developing a distinctive voice in the earlier sections of his poetic cycle Labyrinths, clearly potent images mixing with less readily accessible  expressions, a progression eventually issuing into the limpid beauty of the conclusion of   "Path of Thunder", where mysterious beauty and endlessly reveverberating images, glowing like brightly flowing water, converge. Beauty undeniable even as it's meaning remains open to endless interpretation.

Kant demonstrates profoundly that quality of undeniable beauty stimulating infinite re-reading and rethinking as understanding and appreciation endessly unfold.

Kant is easier to understand than the Commedia of the Italian writer Dante Alighieri, sublime poetry in dialogue with a forest of learning, amplifying the evocative power of his images and verbal music, his poetic rhythm, but allusions the reader often needs  notes by the editor to illuminate. 

I see reading Kant as needing a basic guide to his individualistic terminology and a presentation of a view of his goals, after which the reader can travel freely through his universe.

Reading commentary on Kant then becomes a means to experience other perspectives which might further illumine one, but which, no matter how insightful, cannot replace the thrill of one's personal journey through  Kant's universe.

Great creatives often create a view of the world, a view which some  may see as reflecting the world, a clear understanding of reality, but, which falls short of the complexity and scope of the universe, as Kant suggests in arguing in Critique of Pure Reason, for the impossibility of proving the existence of God from the design of the universe, even though he too had such ambitions of totalistic answers.

Such efforts at totality, at creating mirrors of reality, are at best, another object added to the world, as one such ambitious writer realised on his deathbed, after a lifetime of effort, as Jorge Louis Borges depicts in one of his stories, such cognitive ambitions and their paradoxes being a recurrent theme of this master of philosophical fiction.

Kant is better appreciated as a person using a range of resources as he struggles to clarify and express his own ideas.

He therefore speaks in different voices, from the poetic to the analytical,  unifying both.

One could better appreciate him by moving from what strikes one in his writing to what is less readily understandable, seeking their connections through careful attention and re-reading to unravel the treasures within.

One also does not have to read him only sequentially, from beginning to end, but may dip in anywhere one likes, seeking attractive nuggets, allowing these to inspire one as one seeks to grasp the larger flow of his arguments.

Kant's superb metaphors reinforce this understanding of his work as a many faceted tapestry, approachable using different methods of study.

He often uses metaphors as a means of summing up his goals and methods  in his Critique of Pure Reason, described as his greatest work.

I get the impression that the entire book is recurrently summed up by Kant using powerful metaphors, images vividly evoking his ideas by appealing to the sense of sight, enabling the reader better appreciate his abstractions by relating them to concrete realities people can readily imagine.

In this regard, Kant operates in the tradition of his predecessor in Western philosophy, Aristotle, whose Metaphysics begins "All men (meaning everyone) by nature desire to know, as demonstrated by the delight they take in being able to see, which enables them see the differences between things".

How do these things we see come together to constitute the world?

Are they pointing to an ultimate unity?

Could such a unity represent the fulfillment of all possibilities?

Could such a unity be responsible for the existence of what exists?

How may these questions be answered?

Aristotle decisively contributes to launching Western philosophy in asking and trying to answer such questions, as demonstrated by his book and as superbly illuminated for me by my favourite Aristotle commentary, Jonathan Lear's Aristotle: The Desire to Understand.

Religions have their own answers to such questions.

Western philosphy across the centuries  is particularly striking in  taking advantage of religious responses but also seeking to see how far human reason can go towards answering these questions without relying on religion.

Thus, Kant is famous for the expression, "sapere aude!" Latin, for "trust your own intelligence!" a possible translation of an expression from his "What is Enlightenment?"

The ancient Greeks, against the background of Greek religion, and at times inspired by it, had done this.

Kant and his fellows in Europe were again doing something similar in their own way, during the movement known as the Enlightenment.

How do we move from what we can see to what we cannot see in order to answer questions about the ultimate meaning of what we can see?

Aristotle's Metaphysics is driven by that question, a question that also underlies science.

If it cannot be seen, heard, felt, smelled ir tasted, if  it can't be demonstrated  in a manner that satisfies the reason of most people, how can what we think be called knowledge, Kant may be understood as asking.

The field of these endless controversies, moving from what we experience to what is beyond our experience, is called metaphysics, Kant states in the preface to the first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason.

Images of battle, images of seeds and maggots, images of architectural construction, explorations of beautiful and dangerous landscapes, he uses these and more in his  examination of such questions, enlivening the discussion, images fixing ideas in the mind, facilitating recollection and expansion through reflection. 

He powerfully depicts the development of broad ranging creative ideas as akin to a seed growing in the soil of the mind, a seed containing vast potential that emerges only as the seed grows according to the laws of nature, in its own way, at its own time, a growth not always obvious to the mind of the person where it is taking place.

The person becomes aware of the blossoming of the plant which the seed has become only after this growth has reached a point where the person's conscious mind registers this growth long gestating in the subconscious, and even then, the person who has gestated that idea might not fully grasp it's implications, a further understading that may be better reached by others now that the idea has been born and may be more carefully examined.

Kant does not use the term "subconscious" beceause it had not been developed by the 18th century in which he lived, but he insightfully outlines it's role in creativity.

This development of ideas in the darkness of the mind, as the seed grows in the darkness of earth, is also like the emergence of maggots from organic matter, as they suddenly emerge through a developmental process invisible to the unaided eyes, so states the Konigsberg thinker who laboured for decades on his own ideas, following where they led, and who thus speaks from personal experience.

Maggots, seeds, forms of organic nature, from the repellent to the attractive, from animate to inanimate life, that is the evocative spectrum the rich thinker travels in suggesting for the reader his understanding of the creative power of the human mind, ideas he further reinforces using architectural metaphors.

The hidden growth of the seed, the unseen development of maggots- where is this development of ideas leading?

To the creation of  grand edifices of knowledge, towers that encapsulate the totality of nature, to the exploration of the  mind studying nature from within it's place as part of nature.

This quest may even go beyond nature to that beyond nature and mind, the unconditioned one responsible for all conditions, to the degree that that such an ultimacy can be understood, so states the ambitious thinker.

We are building a house of knowledge, he said,  a tower to reach the heavens.

But, the materials I have assembled show the tower cannot reach the heavens, he concedes.

The heavens are beyond our experience. So the structure can reach only to the level of our experience, he concludes.

So many views on how to reach the heavens, an impossible dream, hence the various laborers have dispersed, different groups building their own little edifices as they know best.

This image of Kant's adapts the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, built by people trying to reach God.

Their efforts were disrupted by God's afflicting them with different languages, so they could no longer understand each other,  and so abandoned the project, leaving God alone in his inaccessibility.

For me though, since I see that I can't reach the heavens I will do what I can and resume again the construction of the edifice to the level it can go.

I hereby assemble my tools and draw my plan.

So states Kant in the second part of his Critique of Pure Reason, " The Transcendental Doctrine of Method" looking back at the first part "The Transcendental Doctrine of Elements".

The image of the seed and maggots is used in "The Architectonic of  Pure Reason" in describing the process of constructing  the edifice of knowledge.

Beautiful conceptions, arrestingly projected through memorable images, evoking ambition and humility, sensitivity and creative drive.

Brother of Konigsberg, I salute you.

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

Seeds  and maggots of Talibanism in Kant.

Not only is Kant a racist but he is also a misogynist .

and homophobic. Women must be subordinate to men and

professional women are viewed as  aberrations, in his perspective. 

Here are some references to pursue:

For What Can the Kantian Feminist Hope? Constructive Complicity in Appropriations of the Canon

D Huseyinzadegan - Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2018 

Prejudices of a Referenced Philosopher

YM Alsalihi, E Cousin-Peterson, PC Kuo - JAMA, 2020 

…

Paradoxes in Kant's account of citizenship

R Beiner - Responsibility in Context, 2010 - Springer

Helga Varden, Sex, Love, and Gender: A Kantian Theory Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020 Pp. xxii+ 337 ISBN 9780198812838 (hbk)£ 65.00

C Sabourin - Kantian Review, 2021 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department, Central Connecticut State University
www.africahistory.net

http://web.ccsu.edu/afstudy/archive.html

Chief Editor- "Africa Update"

www.vimeo.com/gloriaemeagwali

Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries

2014 Distinguished Research Excellence Award in African Studies

 University of Texas at Austin

2019   Distinguished Africanist Award                   

New York African Studies Association

 

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Sent: Sunday, September 5, 2021 11:02 PM
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Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Kant, the Seed, the Maggots and the Tower of Babel ( Expanded and Edited)

 

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