Poetry, Spirituality, Philosophy : The Multifaceted Thought of Immanuel Kant: A Very, Very Short Illustrated Introduction

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

                                                     

                                                                       

                                                   Poetry, Spirituality, Philosophy 

                                             The Multifaceted Thought of Immanuel Kant

                                               A Very, Very Short Illustrated Introduction 

                                                                              

                           

                                                   

                  

                      

The cosmic and human dynamism of Dutch/French artist Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night, 1889,  incidentally resonates with Immanuel Kant's reflections on intersections of self and cosmos presented in this essay.  

Image source : Starry Night,  Wikipedia, from  Google Cultural Institute.

                                  

                                                      Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                     Compcros

                                               Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

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

           

                                                                                    Abstract

                        A presentation of German philosopher Immanuel Kant as an imaginative writer and a spiritual thinker.       

                        These ideas are developed in dialogue with landscape art, landscape aesthetics being a major inspiration

                        for Kant's work.

                         

                        Great thanks to Björn Freter whose enquiry on Kant in the USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google  group 

                         inspired my taking up  the close attention to Kant I have long aspired to.

The 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant is one of history's greatest poetic constructors, one of its most sublime spiritual writers, within the context of his often magnificent philosophical creations.

He might need to be given more credit for these artistic qualities and spiritual values,  qualities contributing to the totality of his achievement as  a foundationally seminal thinker in the history of Western thought. The most remarkable passages in the world's greatest religious literatures and poetic texts are not superior to comparable passages of Kant's.

The exquisitely projected anguish of the Biblical Psalms, the Koranic invocation of Allah as light in terms of images of rock and lamp, tree and terrestrial unity, the Hindu Upanishadic depictions  of the little room in the heart that yet contains cosmos, an idea of the unity of the human self and the Ultimate, the Yoruba origin Ifa image of the crystallization of being in terms of dew falling from heaven as myriads of existence giving birth to the multiplicity of Earth, in the poem ''Ayajo Asuwada,''  presented, among other sources, in Akinsola Akiwowo's "Contributions to the Sociology of Knowledge from an African Oral Poetry," these and more examples from the heights of humanity's yearnings towards a realty that encapsulates and transcends the material world are not  in any way superior to Kant in his poetic spirit.

This magnificent prismatic unity of Kant's work, a many faceted  diamond, its myriad colours  unified in white light,  makes  clear the distance between a  reality and descriptions of that reality, between a poem and a paraphrase of that poem, between a living, breathing, active human being and a drawing of that person, between encountering Kant for oneself and reading about Kant, helpful as such guides may be in enticing one to encounter the master for oneself.  

                                                                               

                     

                                  Towering landscapes framing the quiet forms of animals and humans. Inanimate but eloquent

                                  majesty in its seeming agelessness, marked by vast cycles of geological time, contrasting and 

                                  resonating with the smaller life cycles represented by the animal and human presences.

                                  This poignant watercolor  by Zhang Quan Zong inimitably realizes the aesthetics of  classical

                                  Chinese landscape painting, values resonant with Kant's meditations on similar themes.

                                   Image source: aliexpress.com

I'm composing an introduction to Kant meant to initiate readers into the multifaceted expressive scope of this master of thought, as integrating poetic and imaginative conceptions and expressions, profound spiritual sensitivity and impressively careful reasoning, qualities that remain spellbinding even when one disagrees with his lines of thought and conclusions.

From that forthcoming essay, here are selections of some of those wonderfully poetic and spiritually powerful lines from Kant's work, along with short selections from my commentaries on them. The headings are composed by me. 

Kant often writes in blocks of complex sentences, expounding , in one sentence, a main idea in terms of its constituting units. These units are separated by commas, completed by a full stop after a significant unfolding of those ideas, the entire sequence of a number of these complex sentences unbroken by paragraph breaks. This stream of ideas suggests the fervent rush  of chains of thought and their rich interconnections, a style at times requiring re-reading to better appreciate the unfolding tapestry in terms of it's powerful, multiple nodes of conjunction.

I break up the first passage I quote into paragraphs so as to aid appreciation, but at the risk of diluting the cumulative power of its  architectonic force.

"Architectonic" is a particularly evocative term of Kant's from  the section  ''Architectonics of Pure Reason" in Critique of Pure Reason. It indicates the organization of ideas into a unity suggesting the complexly harmonious interrelationship of a building or a natural form:

                                                                   The Starry Heavens and the Moral Law

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 at my invisible self, my personality, and displays to me a world which has true infinity, but which can be discovered only through the understanding, and with which I recognize that my connection with that world (and thereby with all those visible worlds as well) is not merely contingent, as in the first case, but universal and necessary. 

The first view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature, which must give back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter of which it was formed, after it has been provided for a short time (we know not how) with vital power. 

The second, on the contrary, infinitely elevates my worth, as an intelligence, through my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the entire world of the senses, at least as far as may be inferred from the destination assigned to my existence by this law, a destination which is not restricted to the conditions and limits of this life, but reaches into the infinite.

(A translation of a single passage from Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, compiled from various translations of the  passage. These sources are  the translation that opens the central section of A.W. Moore’s The Infinite, 2018, xxiv,  the two different translations with which Paul Guyer begins the main text of his Kant, 2006, 1-3 and his edited The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, 2006, 1 and  Thomas Kingsmill Abbot’s translation of Critique of Practical Reason, 2004, 170) 

Those lines are both imaginative and intellectual, a combination of acute spiritual yearning and ideational power, blending profound aesthetic, spiritual and cognitive sensitivities, an ultimate testament to the sapiential power of the human being, knowing self and knowing the universe, at the point of intersection of both.

In that passage, Kant may be seen as reworking such Biblical conceptions as the creation of humanity from the dust of the Earth to which substance the human person returns at the end of their Earthly life, as well Christian ideas of the eternity of the soul within the context of moral purity, and scientific cosmological pictures of cosmic grandeur, uniquely distilling these inspirational predecessors through the spectrum of his intimate personal experience, an intimacy charging those ideational configurations with emotional power. 

He thereby creates his own original conceptions, deeply spiritual without being anchored to any particular religion, largely appreciable by anyone without assent to any creed, an ideational construct reworking various sensitivities   through his own cognitive prisms.

Kant scholars Patrick Frierson (  “Kant and the End of Wonder”, Philosophy Begins in Wonder: An Introduction to Early
Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Funk Deckard and Péter Losonczi, 2011 ) and  Paul Guyer (Kant)  analyze that passage as foundational to all Kant’s work, summing up its  central preoccupations. 

Other Kant texts complement those majestic lines, demonstrating conclusively why he was once offered a professorship of poetry. 

In Critique of Pure Reason and The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God he lays out the argument for belief in God by reasoning from the order of nature to the idea of a creator of that order.

He presents the argument so as to demonstrate its limitations  but his statement of the logic of the argument is so powerful, the power of his summation is not overcome by his critique of it.  

He potently dramatizes his own internalization of the inspirational sources of the argument even as he presents himself as going beyond the conclusions drawn from those inspirational grounds.

 I quote here only his evocation of wonder, not the entire argument, from Critique of Pure Reason:

 

                                                       Struck Dumb by the Wonder of Existence 

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)

These lines are a development from other equally lyrically powerful lines from an earlier exploration of the same idea in The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God.

In responding to the relationship between the microscopic study of biological forms and telescopic exploration of the celestial world, he declares:

                                                               The Amazing Complexity of Being 

 

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.

(Translated by David Walford and Ralf Meerbote in   Theoretical Philosophy,  I755-I770. 1992. Note on page 159)

                                                                                               

                                              

           

An amazing evocation by Xinling yi Fang of the atmospheric resonance, the dialogue of space and form, of the human and the non-human, within a matrix of delicate but profoundly evocative beauty, that Chinese art has inimitably made its own. His own intimate experience of similar sensitivities is one of the deepest sources from which Kant's  work arises. The beauty and power of existence, the majesty of nature and of the self witnessing this panorama animate his work.

Image source: Shutterstock. 

Resonating with Xinling yi Fang's image of delicate and yet majestic beauty, of the evanescence of atmosphere and the grandeur of mountains, is Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō on time and eternity, on travelling and infinity, the same universe of ideas in terms of which Kant contemplates the journey of life as a motion between the unknown and the unknown within the context of infinity:

                                                                                 

"The months and days are the travelers of eternity. The years that come and go are also voyagers. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home. Many of the men of old died on the road, and I too for years past have been stirred by the sight of a solitary cloud drifting with the wind to ceaseless thoughts of wandering... "

The opening lines of Bashō's Oku No Hosomichi,  The Narrow Road to the Deep North, as translated in Sam Hamill's  The Essential Bashō, 1999 and Donald Keene, The Narrow Road to Oku, 1996. Source: Narrow Road to the Deep North: Opening Paragraph: Ten Translations. The University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.

          

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