The Value of Organized Knowledge: Immanuel Kant on The Architectonic in Human Knowledge: A Rendition and Reworking in Everyday English

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

                                                                       

                                                     

  

                                                     The Value of Organized Knowledge 

                                                                       

                                      Immanuel Kant on The Architectonic in Human Knowledge

                                         A Rendition and Reworking in Everyday English

                                                                               

                                           

Abstract Islamic art, as in this magnificent example from pixels.com, is incidentally, one of the best visualizations of the idea of unity in complexity indicated by Immanuel Kant’s concept of the architectonic.

                                                        Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                        Compcros

                                                 Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

                                       Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge

                                                                     Abstract

A rendition and reworking of selections from the opening sections of German philosopher Immanuel Kant's chapter, ''The Architectonic of Pure Reason'' from his Critique of Pure Reason, highlighting the beauty of the logic, the imagistic force and controlled passion of the chapter, suggesting its priceless significance as a summation of processes of human creativity and thought.

Suggestions for further reading come after the rendition.

    Contents

    The Architectonic 

     Conscious and Subconscious Creativity in System Building

     Organic Unity in System Building

     Universality and Foundations of  Systematic Thought 

     Rationale of this Rendition and Reworking

     Method of Rendition

    Suggested Further Reading Out of a Vast Field on this Section of Kant's Philosophy 

         Foundational on the Idea of the Architectonic in the Context of Kantian Philosophy and the Western 

         Philosophical Tradition

                By Paula Manchester

     On the Inter-Cultural and Interdisciplinary Significance of the Kantian Architectonic, Specifically with 

     Reference to the Chinese Divinatory and Philosophical Text the Yijing

                By Stephen R. Palmquist 

     On Charles Sanders Pierce's Adaptation of Kant's Concept of the Architectonic

    The Architectonic 

By pure reason, I understand the power of the human mind to understand things through reasoning, without relying on experience, working things out through careful logical steps accessible by anyone.

By an architectonic, I refer to the art of systems. Systems of knowledge. 

The architectonic is the organization of varied aspects of knowledge into a system, like a house, in which the relationship between all the parts is clear.

Such a system is different from simply bringing ideas together without working out how they relate to each other and demonstrating why they are so related. 

Heaping ideas together without adequate structural unity is not a system. 

Simple aggregation of ideas is not a system. 

A system is the unity of various ideas under one idea.

Creating such systems is crucial if we are to maximise the value of our knowledge. If one cannot see the relationships between the various parts of a body of ideas, how well can one understand the whole, and even the full significance of each part?

If such relationships are not understood, knowledge becomes like a beautiful song, the loveliness of which is  appreciated, but its full meaning inadequately grasped. 

As systematic unity, making a system out of a mere aggregate of knowledge, is what first raises ordinary knowledge to the rank of critical and methodical understanding,  the architectonic is the conception of the scientific, the critical and methodical,  in our knowledge, and therefore necessarily forms part of our method.

     Conscious and Subconscious Creativity in System Building

But, how can such systems be created, systems that are so well organised they seem like the relationship between a seed and the tree that grows out of it?

The seed.

What is the central idea that could bring together the ideas in question?

This central idea should be something present to all of them even if not obvious unless through careful study. 

The unifying significance of this idea might not even be obvious to the person who created the body of ideas to which this idea is central.

Ideas have a life of their own within the person who created them and outside that person after they have been expressed.

Ideas are so rich that the more one reflects on them, the better they are understood.

The discovery of the central idea unifying a body of ideas and working out how this unification may be best described, might not even be arrived at through direct mental effort.

It could arrive through long investigation of those ideas, gathering diverse materials, then slowly, like maggots emerging from a piece of meat through a process not visible to the eyes, this understanding begins to surface.

Slowly, like worms coming to light through a process unseen, understanding dawns.

Garbled at first but becoming complete with  time, at first imperfect, but only gradually attaining to perfection, although it was already contained  in the primary idea, the  original seed, hidden as understanding is evolving, coming to light after this process reaches a particular stage. 

It is too bad that it is first possible for us to glimpse such an  idea in a clearer light and to outline a whole architectonically,  only after we have long collected relevant ideas haphazardly, like building materials, and worked through them without an understanding of their deep unity,  with only a hint, a sense of their unity,  from an idea lying hidden within us. 

     Organic Unity in System Building

When these ideas are adequately organized into a unity, the central idea is seen to imply all the other ideas related to it. 

It is seen as a seed from which the tree of understanding grows. 

It is like the fire of life around which a biological form such as the human body develops.

Growth in such instances implies development in terms of a pattern within the biological constitution of the form.

The development of the human body implies growth of limbs and other parts in a precise number, not adding more legs or hands to the customary two legs or two hands, but the strengthening and  proportionate development of the body parts.

So with the systematic development of ideas.

          Universality and Foundations of  Systematic Thought 

Hence not only is each system structured according to an idea, but all systems may be purposively combined with one another, as members of one whole, in a system of human knowledge, and so admit of an architectonic of all human understanding. 

All systems are part of the process of systematizing knowledge that is a natural drive of human beings, generating  the total body of knowledge systems developed by humanity.

Reason is impelled by a propensity of its nature to venture outward, beyond the limits of experience,  by means of ideas, to the utmost bounds of all cognition, and to find rest for the first time in the completion of its sphere, in a self-subsistent systematic whole.

Is it possible to develop a complete grasp of all knowledge systems and their interrelationships?

A worthy goal but can it be reached?

Even if the relationships between all knowledge systems might be too extensive to map, its possible to work out the principles underlying all efforts at developing knowledge.

That has been my goal in this book.

Rationale of this Rendition and Reworking

The 18th century German philosopher  Immanuel Kant is a great thinker who has many wonderful things to say along with demonstrating evidence of the limitations of his knowledge and thinking.

Understanding Kant, however, often takes a lot of patience,  going carefully through his arguments as he painstakingly works through delicate ideas, defining and refining concepts, dividing ideas into their constituent parts and unifying them again, forever seeking to milk a topic fully of its juice even while recognizing that such totalistic analysis is impossible.

In working out this delicately beautiful tapestry of ideas, like a semi-transparent cloth the splendour of which is enhanced by the sun shining through it, illuminating its design as it generates new luminosities from the beautiful fabric, he invokes a succession of concepts, terms which he uses in weaving his arguments, the terms being the needles, the structure of argument the thread, and the whole outcome the cloth being woven, terms which are both in his native German and in Latin.

Some  English translators retain the Latin terms while   translating the German expressions. The Latin terms demonstrate a suggestive, poetic power  often readily accessible to the English reader on account of that language being one of the sources of English.

Paraphrases  of Kant are helpful but cannot suggest the relentless power of his style of thinking in action, the cumulative force of his method  of constructing arguments, the unique potency of his mind, carefully and deeply honed through years of dedicated thought and study, qualities that are often as valuable as whatever specific things he might be saying at any point in his large body of work.

The rendition  I present above is a reworking of a small part of  ''The Architectonic of Pure Reason'' from  J. M.D Meiklejohn's, Paul Guyer and Allen Wood's, Friedrich Max Muller and Marcus Weigelt's, Werner Pluhar's and Norman Kemp Smith's  English translations of  Critique of Pure Reason.

In that section, culminating at least a decade of dedicated examination of central problems of philosophy as understood in the Europe of his time, Kant sums up what can be seen as his own understanding of the processes through which he developed his ideas, describing the universal significance of those processes, processes leading to that epochal book and the creative avalanche that followed from him.

It suggests a leisurely but consistent style of scholarship, ripening across significant periods of time, in the spirit of fellow German thinker Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's expression, ''ohne hast, ohne rast'' '', ''unhasting, unresting'', more fully, '' ohne hast, aber ohne rast  '',  ''without haste but without rest''.

I chose to work on this segment because its one of my favourites in those sections of Kant I'm acquainted with as I work my way through his work, and, working on system construction right now, I reread the chapter to help me better understand what I am trying to achieve in the other project I am engaged in.

This Kant chapter is sublime in its sensitivity to the human hunger for order, particularly in the development of knowledge at various scales. It's also striking for its alertness  to the puzzling ways that knowledge may be developed.

He memorably describes relationships between conscious efforts and subconscious gestation as coming together to enable creativity, centuries before such mental processes were carefully studied and named. His insights along these lines are relevant to intellectual and artistic efforts generally and even to understanding the course of human life, its central meanings arriving  only after years of proceeding through the confluence of  the unanticipated and the deliberate.

Method of Rendition

The subheadings are mine. The first and last sentences are mine. The rest of the text is largely Kant's although I added expressions to clarify the flow of ideas and  often reworked Kant's sentences for easier understanding.

I left out all the Latin expressions since they are best appreciated by the Kant reader ready to acclimatise fully to his expressive universe, even in translation, while this piece is an introduction to that universe. 

I used only English translations since that is the only language in which I can read Kant. The translations are beautiful and powerful. One, that by Meiklejohn, is relatively simple, as far as that is possible with such a richly structured text and they are all dazzling with the unqualified power of Kant's ideational progression. 

Suggested Further Reading Out of a Vast Field on this Section of Kant's Philosophy 

     Foundational on the Idea of the Architectonic in the Context of Kantian Philosophy and the Western 

     Philosophical Tradition

''Architectonic'', Oxford Reference.

''Architectonic studies the systematic structure of our knowledge. For Kant, ‘Human reason is by nature architectonic’ because ‘it regards all our knowledge as belonging to a possible system’. Many Kantian philosophers,  such as Peirce, insist that we shall only know how philosophical knowledge is possible when we can understand its place within a unified system of knowledge.''

Quoting C.J. Hookway on ''Architectonic'' in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy,  ed by Ted Honbderich, 2005, 48. 

         By Paula Manchester

1. ''What Kant Means by Architectonic''

In Ralph Schumacher, Rolf-Peter Horstmann & Volker Gerhardt (eds.), Kant Und Die Berliner Aufklärung: Akten des Ix. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses.  De Gruyter. pp. 622-630

2. ''Kant’s Conception of Architectonic in Its Philosophical Context''

2008 - Kant Studien 99 (2):133-151.

3. ''Kant's Conception of Architectonic in its Historical Context''

Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 41, Number 2, April 2003, pp.187-207 

4. For those who can read German, Manchester states in ''Kant’s Conception of Architectonic in Its Philosophical Context''  that ''The  most  comprehensive  discussion  of  the  philosophical  issues  in  the relation  between architectonic and system in Kant was given in a series of essays in: Architektonik und System in der Philosophie Kants. Eds. Hans Friedrich Fulda and Jürgen Stolzenberg. Hamburg, 2001.'' 

On the Inter-Cultural and Interdisciplinary Significance of Kantian Architectonic, Specifically with Reference to the Chinese Divinatory and Philosophical Text the Yijing

By Stephen R. Palmquist 

1. "Architectonic Reasoning and Interpretation in Kant and the Yijing.''

2011 - Journal of Chinese Philosophy 38 (4):569-583.

2. ''Twelve Basic Philosophical Concepts in Kant and the Compound Yijing.''

2015 - Journal of Chinese Philosophy 42 (1-2):143-162.

3. ''Mapping Kant's Architectonic onto the Yijing Via the Geometry of Logic. ''

 2012 - Journal of Chinese Philosophy 39 (supplement S1):93-111.

Sources of References -Phil Papers and Googe search 

On Charles Sanders Pierce's Adaptation of Kant's Concept of the Architectonic

1. Charles Sanders Peirce:Architectonic Philosophy

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed 6/13/2023

The subject matter of architectonic is the structure of all human knowledge. The purpose of providing an architectonic scheme is to classify different types of knowledge and explain the relationships that exist between these classifications.

The architectonic system of C. S. Peirce (1839-1914) divides knowledge according to it status as a “science” and then explains the interrelation of these different scientific disciplines. His belief was that philosophy must be placed within this systematic account of knowledge as science.

 Peirce adopts his architectonic ambitions of structuring all knowledge, and organizing philosophy within it, from his great philosophical hero, Kant. This systematizing approach became crucial for Peirce in his later work. However, his belief in a structured philosophy related systematically to all other scientific disciplines was important to him throughout his philosophical life.

2. ''Peirce's Conception of Architectonic and Related Views''

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,Vol. 15, No. 3 (Mar., 1955), pp. 351-359